Understanding meta-analysis through data simulation with applications to power analysis

Meta-analysis is a powerful tool to combine evidence from existing literature. Despite several introductory and advanced materials about organizing, conducting, and reporting a meta-analysis, to our knowledge, there are no introductive materials about simulating the most common meta-analysis models. Data simulation is essential for developing and validating new statistical models and procedures. Furthermore, data simulation is a powerful educational tool for understanding a statistical method. In this tutorial, we show how to simulate fixed-effects, random-effects, and meta-regression models and illustrate how to estimate statistical power. In the supplementary materials, we extended these simulations also for multilevel and multivariate models.