Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ricksplat 3506 days ago
I noting that more and more meta-analyses are kind of falling out of fashion. They're increasingly being viewed as having dubious scientific merit and should be viewed similarly to "lit reviews". As well as some obvious biases there are other subtle issues, such as incomplete data or poorly matched data-sets. There's a list of short-comings on the wikipedia page which should provide a good primer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-analysis#Problems

Basically, we need to be careful about accepting the results of meta-analyses as scientific fact. They are useful for illustrative purposes but really, at the end of the day if you're going to settle an argument you're going to need rigorous methodology, data-collection and reporting, as well as the all important reproducibility, falsifiability and verifiablity.

1 comments

You are free to go to the list of references in that meta analysis article, and look at the results of the individual studies.
Just like with any lit review.