REPLY
Meta-analyses Evaluating Diagnostic Tests
Les Irwig;
Anna N. A. Tosteson; and
Constantine Gatsonis
15 November 1994 | Volume 121 Issue 10 | Pages 817-818
IN RESPONSE:
We thank Dr. Wolf for his comments. Our aim in using the judgments of the three independent raters was to accept the majority view rather than to reach consensus among disparate views by discussion. Some meta-analysts prefer discussion because discrepancies are often caused by a rater missing a critical bit of information rather than by a difference in judgment.
In principle, we agree that measures of inter-rater agreement would be of interest. In our article, based on only 11 studies, we did not calculate 
statistics because they would have had uninterpretably wide confidence intervals.
We agree that a summary table of primary studies by criteria is useful in a meta-analysis addressing a particular question. The meta-analyses we reviewed addressed many questions. Because different meta-analyses were good examples of different guidelines, we decided to refer to particular examples in the Review section of our article when appropriate rather than to list the cross-classification of studies by criteria.
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