I am currently undertaking a meta-analysis of the expression profile of specific biomarkers in a specific disease. During the extraction process, I extracted the name of the biomarkers and their corresponding p-value for each included study. The p value indicates how “good” this biomarker correlates with the disease.
In some studies, only p values in the form of “p < 0.05”, “p.<0.01”, “p<0.001”,”p>0.05" were provided. Unfortunately, the program I am using (which conducts a p-value based meta-analysis) doesn’t recognise those p-value forms.
One of my supervisor suggested me to convert p<0.05 to 0.05, p<0.01 to 0.01 and p>0.05 to 0.5. However he couldn’t give me a rationale for this.
Could someone provide me a rationale on how I should/could convert these p values? I think that reviewers might ask on which basis this conversion was done.