A new command, metafunnel, is available. This plots funnel plots: graphical
displays used to examine whether the results of a meta-analysis may have
been affected by publication or other types of bias. It uses Stata 8
graphics, and follows meta-analytic conventions in plotting standard error
(the measure of study size) on the vertical axis and treatment effect on
the horizontal axis. Pseudo 95% confidence interval lines are also plotted.
The command may be installed by typing -ssc install metafunnel- within
Stata. I am grateful to Kit Baum for making it available on the Statistical
Software Components archive, and to Tom Steichen for helpful comments on
the command and for writing a dialog, which is automatically downloaded
from the archive along with the command.
Jonathan Sterne
Department of Social Medicine
University of Bristol, UK
