Meta‐analysis by combining p‐values: Simulated linkage studies

Meta‐analysis has been little explored to make an overall assessment of linkage from different studies. In practice, it is likely that published linkage studies will only report p‐values. We compared the performance of the widely used Fisher method for combining p‐values with that of pooling raw data. More loci were consistently found by pooling raw data. In the absence of further information, combining p‐values can provide an overall, but limited, assessment of different linkage studies. However, meta‐analysis would be better viewed as a preliminary step toward the goal of analyzing the pooled raw data.