Are meta-analyses worth the hassle? TL;DR: It depends

With an ever-growing number of scientific articles published each year, evidence syntheses, especially meta-analyses, are becoming essential to understand and summarize scientific development, and thus, to inform future research and policies. However, meta-analyses rarely constitute the endpoints of scientific debates and in fact, most meta-analyses are of low quality and poorly interpreted. Drawing from my own ecological and evolutionary biology meta-analyses, in this talk, I plan to provide a general introduction to meta-analysis with a special focus on how to read and interpret meta-analyses, and most importantly how to identify the good, the bad, and the ugly.