Performance of statistical methods for meta-analysis when true study effects are non-normally distributed: A comparison between DerSimonian–Laird and restricted maximum likelihood

However, due to computational limitations we did not include Restricted Maximum Likelihood (REML) estimator for the between-study variance. Lately, we have observed that the iterative REML approach has been increasingly replacing the non-iterative DerSimonian-Laird (DL) as the method of choice in published meta-analyses. Jackson et al examined the performance of the two methods in terms of coverage, for normally distributed effects only, and found that results for the two methods were similar.