Understanding the value of meta-analysis in Epilepsy. Are we using more than required?

Meta-analyses were not used initially in medicine. In the 1700s, there was an absence of a clear method to summarize results from different studies [1]. Among the scholars whose works were essential to the development of meta-analytic techniques in the 18th and 19th century were astronomers, physics, and mathematicians like Carl Friedrich Gauss and Pierre-Simon Laplace [1,2]. However, it was the astronomer George Biddell Airy, in his book “On the Algebraical and Numerical Theory of Error of Observation and the Combination of Observation,” to first publish a method for combining results of multiple scientific studies [3].

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