Visualisation of the simulation results
In Figures 3-6 we show the results of treating increasing proportions of missing SDs and/or SSs on the grand mean of the three investigated effect sizes (log response ratio, Hedges’ d and Fisher’sz ). The different figures 3-6 correspond to the four deletion/correlation scenarios (MCAR, MAR, MNAR, corMCAR) and are similarly organized in the style of a row-by-column matrix. The 14 rows correspond to the 14 options to treat missing data (labelled on the right and described in Table 1). The seven columns correspond to the three effect sizes (log response ratio, Hedges’ d or Fisher’sz ) and the type of data deleted (only SDs, only SSs or both). Fisher’s z was weighted by SSs alone and thus only those could be deleted. Within each figure, every cell corresponds to a specific combination of the effect size investigated, the type of data deleted and the treatment applied. Within each cell, we show how an increasing proportion of deleted data (from 10% at the top to 90% at the bottom) leads to deviations of the grand mean (solid coloured line) and one side (i.e. 50%) of its corresponding confidence interval (dotted lines) from the estimates of a fully informed weighted meta-analysis (solid black line). Coloured lines that match the solid black line indicate that the respective treatment of missing data leads to grand means and confidence intervals that strongly resemble those from fully informed weighted meta-analyses.