The book by Gian Luca Di Tanna and Robert Grant is now available, providing practical tools for analysing and summarising evidence.
The book Bayesian Meta-Analysis: a practical introduction (CRC Press, 2025), written by Gian Luca Di Tanna , Full Professor of Biostatistics and Health Economics and Head of Research and Services at the Department of Business, Health and Social Economics at SUPSI, together with his British colleague Robert Grant , an expert statistician in Bayesian models and evidence synthesis, co-developer of Stan and chartered fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.
The book is intended as a practical and immediately usable tool for those who work with systematic reviews and evidence synthesis from different sources. It is not a theoretical manual, but a guide that accompanies researchers, students, health economists and health policy analysts in the use of Bayesian methods in real-world contexts. Bayesian methods offer greater flexibility in incorporating prior knowledge and uncertainty, producing more informative results than traditional approaches.
Through numerous examples, case studies and ready-to-use code for different software platforms, the book offers practical support to those who need to translate advanced statistical models into operational solutions for their daily work. The volume addresses issues such as managing heterogeneity between studies, incorporating indirect evidence and effectively communicating uncertainty.
The publication thus aims to fill an important gap by providing the scientific and professional community with a tool that makes Bayesian methods more accessible in the synthesis of evidence, leading to results that are more easily interpretable and impactful for clinicians and decision makers. To complete the work, a dedicated website, bayesian-ma.net , has also been created, which collects additional materials, code examples, and methodological updates, offering a space for discussion and in-depth analysis.
The book is available on the publisher’s website Routledge and from major online retailers.
