Meta-analysis in ecology and medical science
生态学与医学中的整合分析(Meta-analysis)

Meta-analysis, a quantitative synthesis technique for synthesizing the findings of individual studies, was presented by Glass in 1976. It was widely used in medical science and was imported to ecology study at the beginning of 1990s. It was first introduced into Chinese ecology field in 1998. Due to the characteristics of ecology many new problems, such as data extraction, effect size construction, individual study correlativity, publication bias estimation and adjustment, and so on, appeared in its application, we compared this technique with that in medical science to use for reference and examined the application scope and features. The factors affecting use of this technique in ecology and the existing problems were deeply discussed and the application prospect was also predicted.