"-ebayes- creates two new variables in the dataset: ebest contains empirical Bayes estimate for each study, and ebse the corresponding standard errors." In fact, this is *all* the -ebayes- option does when used on its own - it changes nothing in the output displayed in the results window. If you want to compute combined estimates (under both random and fixed effects models) based on the EB individual estimates, follow your initial "meta ..., ebayes" command by "meta ebest ebse". Note that "meta ..., graph(e)" automatically requests the -ebayes- option and gives a graph of the EB individual estimates plus a combined estimate produced by combining those EB individual estimates under a random effects model. However, it doesn't display this combined estimate in the results window, so if you want to know its numerical value, you still need to do "meta ebest ebse" afterwards. I'd agree that this is a little confusing and arguably the -ebayes- option should do this for you automatically. However, this two-stage procedure does make it clearer how the estimates are being produced, and the -ebayes- option seems unlikely to be of interest to casual users. Picking up on another current thread (Hodrick Prescott-Filter / outdated modules - posts by Kit Baum and Nick Cox in particular), this is another program from the STB archive. So as Kit wrote, "... the program itself can't be altered, only updated by a later published version." But maybe in this case an extra sentence could usefully be added to the help file?? I'm less clear if this is possible. As I understand Kit's post, updates to STB/SJ material need to be published in the SJ. This hardly seems worthwhile for adding one sentence to a help file. Roger. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Roger Harbord Department of Social Medicine University of Bristol, UK roger.harbord@bristol.ac.uk * * For searches and help try: * http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html * http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq * http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/