Fig. 2

a Probability densities of the direct (blue line) and indirect (black line) log ORs for a fictional target comparison assuming \({\widehat{\mu }}_{D}-{\widehat{\mu }}_{I}=1.17\tau\) (inconsistency evidence) and \(\tau =0.1\) (low statistical heterogeneity [23]), yielding an average information loss (\(D\)) of 0.64. b Probability densities of the direct (blue line) and indirect (black line) log ORs for a fictional target comparison assuming \({\widehat{\mu }}_{D}-{\widehat{\mu }}_{I}=0\) (consistency evidence) and \(\tau =0.1\) (low statistical heterogeneity [23]), yielding an average information loss of 0.13 (stricter threshold)