</a></h3>


<p>Many meta-analyses involve observed outcomes / effect size estimates that cannot be assumed to be independent, because some estimates were computed based on the same sample of subjects (or at least a partially overlapping set). In this case, one should compute the covariances for any pair of estimates that involve (fully or partially) overlapping subjects. Doing so is difficult, but we can often construct an approximate variance-covariance matrix (say <em></em>\(V\)) of such dependent estimat