فراتحليل راهي به سوي شناسايي ارزشيابي تركيب و تلخيص پژوهش هاي گذشته

Meta analysis: a Way to Summarize and Evaluate Previous Researches

Dissertations are a part of the outputs of the research system of our universities. It is necessary to evaluate them periodically to ensure that their quality is developing. In some countries such as U.S.A, dissertations have been evaluated annually based on several criteria. In Iran, dissertations of some fields such as sociology and management have been studied and evaluated against such criteria as: the quality of the methodology, references and documentations, theories tested and etc. In U.S.A., dissertations have been evaluated based on the importance of titles, methodological credit and so on. one type of these evaluations is meta analysis which evaluates the provious researches to summarize and synthesize them when their findings are inconsistent to find out the cause of the inconsistencies and conflicts between them. This kind of research is sometimes called the evaluation of past researches or evaluation of evaluations. In this article meta analysis, its functions, its benefits and its process will be discussed.