Should I use mean to show variations among different studies in meta analysis

Question

[rishav513]

Hello all,

I am performing meta-analysis consisting of eleven different studies. I have 625 samples and calculated the mean of each sample. I want to ask if I could use mean to show the differences between each study.

Thanking you in advance

[barslmn]

You can use means/medians or any other average statistics that you want to emphasize. However, just these averages by themselves are not descriptive enough that's why you should also include other summary statistics like standard deviations, min max values etc. Best is to visualize your data with a box plot or scatter plot. You can find different types of graphs here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descriptive_statistics

[rishav513]

Ok, thank you very much