"One of the hardest things for non‐statisticians conducting meta‐analyses is to figure out how to combine data when the data are in different forms. Using continuous outcome as an example, one study might report before‐and‐after scores, and another might report change scores. Comprehensive Meta‐Analysis allows one to take data in any form and seamlessly converts it so that all the data can be included, or tells the meta‐analyst what additional information is necessary to complete the process. This one aspect of the program can save hours of time for non‐statisticians who are not used to converting data from one format to another."

Ian Shrier - McGill University, Canada

"We had no knowledge on meta‐analyses and were somewhat confused by the number of programs available. Most of them were not easy to use, not insightful and required a priori knowledge of metaanalyses statistics. There was one exception: Comprehensive Meta‐analysis. We downloaded the software and went through the easy‐to‐use tutorial. Within an hour we were performing our own metaanalysis! Our analysis was verified by our statistical department with excellent results, giving us further confidence to continue our analysis and resulting in an excellent paper in the top journal on pain research: Niesters et al., Do Sex Differences Exist in Opioid Analgesia? A Systematic Review and Meta‐ Analysis of Human Experimental and Clinical Studies. Pain, 2010, in press, doi:10.1016/j.pain.2010.06.012."

Albert Dahan, MD, PhD & Marieke Niesters, MD, MSc - Department of Anesthesiology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands