4 ms·

Would someone care to explain what the graphic shown means exactly? I have a hard time understanding what the vertical axis tells me.

• sp332 11y ago
  The studies on the chart are for treatment of cardiovascular disease. The lower they are on the chart, the more they reduced the risk of whatever it was they were trying to prevent (the "primary outcome" for each study).
• gech 11y ago
  When experimenters are required to state their targets beforehand, they fail to meet them. If they don't have to state the outcomes beforehand, then its much easier to spin what they do find as beneficial!
• jmount 11y ago
  (just skimming) I am guessing the y-axis is the observed expected value of the treatment (low being good) and the dots are re-colered to null if the sample size was too small to separate the (not shown) error bars around the dot from no effect. The punchline is: once the researchers had to declare their statistical procedure before turning in the results most of the dots get colored "null." Meaning the strongest effect in the past was the ability to argue your way into a more favorable analysis.