Requiring more empirical studies in ecology: A comparison of sample size in meta-analysis of ecology and medicine

Meta-analysis is an effective and popular tool for studies of systemic literature or research cases review. Compared with medicine, the ecological publications with meta-analysis typically addressed more questions, but with a less datasets. Therefore, in ecology the meta-analysis method should have higher credibility as it does in medicine. For the future of meta-analysis in ecology, the more important work is to implement more empirical studies, such as ‘coordinated distributed experiment’, to get more reliable datasets.