There’s a deluge of scientific studies of all sorts – thousands every day. There’s often a few studies looking for answers on the same topic, but there can be dozens or even hundreds of them. Meta-analysis is a group of statistical techniques that enable data from more than one study to be combined and analyzed as a new dataset.
Meta-analysis didn’t start to spread
until the 1970s. Now there are dozens of publications with meta-analyses every day and it takes less than 5 years for the number published in a year to double.
* Meta-analytic methods are still a bit of a mystery to many people, though.
I’ve written a couple of
“5 things” posts about meta-analysis, but not enough explaining data basics. So here’s the prequel!