[rd11235]

I don’t understand the trend of individual studies making it to the top of HN, while metaanalyses are ignored, despite examining 10s or 100s of such individual studies in aggregate to reduce noise.

There are we-are-human reasons, but are there any logical reasons?

[kjkjadksj]

Individual studies don’t exist in a vacuum. They can cite tens to hundreds of papers just like a meta analysis. The difference is in addition to the literature review they had to do anyway to develop their research question, they also contributed novel data to the field and tried to put it into context. Meta analysis don’t get published in big journals like Nature, novel data do.

[jmull]

I wouldn't necessarily assume people's interest in science is limited to what meta analyses tell us.

A single study probably can't answer the high-level questions (like, "does creatine help build muscle?") but can nevertheless be pretty interesting to read and discuss. (Personally, I found this discussion interesting, and I don't care about the high-level question at all.)

[damnitbuilds]

Thank you for reminding people of this.

[epistasis]

If by "logical" you mean "practical" then the reason is that the study which cost a lot of money to do, the constituent studies that generate data, are more likely to get a press release, and that is how non-specialists learn about new studies. Logically, from the perspective of the university, being able to point out the result of spending a lot of money to contribute to human knowledge is important, so they publicize these expensive studies. The metaanalysis is cheap, and takes a few people's time for doing the analysis, no new expensive data involved.

[NotGMan]

Because if studies are trash the meta-result is also trash.

This is what is happening in all nutrition science, where most studies are trash.

That is why you can prove any hypothesis you want by picking (meta) studies in nutrition science.

[Fredkin]

It's like the CDO of science.