A SYSTEMATIC-APPROACH TO CONDUCTING A NONSTATISTICAL METAANALYSIS OF RESEARCH LITERATURE

Literature analyses and syntheses are becoming increasingly important as a means of periodically bringing coherence to a research area, cont ributing new knowledge revealed by integrating single studies, and qui ckly informing scientists of the state of the field. As a result, ther e is a need for approaches that can provide replicable, reliable, and trustworthy results. Over the last decade many researchers have begun using the statistical meta-analysis approach to integrate studies. How ever, the single studies conducted in many areas are not of the type a menable to statistical meta-analysis but are more appropriate for non- statistical analysis and synthesis. The present paper describes (1) a rigorous approach to conducting a non-statistical meta-analysis of res earch literature and (2) an example of how this approach was applied t o the literature on determinants of primary care specialty choice publ ished between 1987 and 1993. This approach includes model development, literature retrieval, literature coding, rating references for qualit y, annotating high-quality references, and synthesizing only the subse t of the literature found of sufficient quality to be considered. Also , the basic results of each included study are reported in the synthes is so that readers have before them all the ''data points'' used in th e synthesis. Thus, readers can draw their own interpretations without having to re-collect the data, just as they would be able to do in any single study that presents original data as well as conclusions and d iscussion.