ProfessorTom Stanley

Professor Tom Stanley is a Meta-Analysis Professor in Deakin Business School. For 31 years, Tom taught many different courses in economics, statistics, and the humanities at Hendrix College, an elite, nationally recognized, undergraduate teaching university. In spite of his heavy teaching load of 6 or 7 different courses per year, his pioneering work on meta-analysis has received wide acclaim, with nearly all meta-analyses of economics research using the methods and the research framework developed and introduced in his papers. In particular, Stanley and Jarrell (Journal of Economic Surveys, 1989) was the first paper on meta-analysis in economics, introducing a new empirical review and assessment methodology, meta-regression analysis, specifically designed to evaluate econometric research findings. This paper along with meta-regression analysis, in general, was chosen by the editors of the Journal of Economic Survey in 2011 as one of the four most important developments in economics over the last quarter century. His paper, "Wheat from chaff: Meta-analysis as quantitative literature review," published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (a leading American Economic Association journal) in 2001, has become the standard reference in the field of meta regression with 854 citations.

Tom has published dozens of papers, often along with Alfred Deakin Professor, Chris Doucouliagos, that develop new methods of meta-analysis and meta-regression and that apply these methods to a wide range of specific research fields within economics as well as health and psychology. Currently, he is developing and applying new approaches for 'meta-science' that investigate the credibility of large areas of research (e.g., economics and psychology) through meta-analysis surveys of many thousands of research papers (Ioannidis et al., 2017; Stanley et al., 2018). Aside from his active research programme, Stanley is a member of DeLMAR (Deakin Lab for the Meta-Analysis of Research), gives numerous workshops and presentations, and co-teaches a PhD class on meta-analysis, MMM909 Meta-Analysis Research Methods.