Harnessing meta-analyses’ insights in ecology and evolution research
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Meta-analyses are powerful tools to synthesise the literature in several fields of study, including ecology and evolution. However, it remains uncertain whether ecologists and evolutionary biologists fully comprehend meta-analyses’ findings or effectively apply them when citing these studies in their own research. Here, we first discuss key meta-analytical concepts and provide a guide to researchers in ecology and evolution on how to harness meta-analyses’ insights. For instance, we clarify the meaning of effect sizes and heterogeneity to improve understanding of meta-analyses’ quantitative findings. In addition, we analysed articles published in 2023 in ecology and evolution to investigate how frequently and in what context meta-analyses were cited. We found that approximately 21% of articles cited at least one meta-analysis, and that the relative number of citations of meta-analyses (0.04% of all citations analysed) was similar to the publication frequency of meta-analytical articles (0.06% of all articles). Most importantly, we found that while the direction of mean effect sizes from cited meta-analyses was often mentioned, the magnitude of effect sizes and the limitations of the data analysed were frequently overlooked. These findings underscore the need for improved citation practices of meta-analyses in ecological and evolutionary research, which our recommendations seek to promote.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it