Are you referring to meta analyses? They are often used to find p-hacking:
[1] http://training.cochrane.org/resource/introduction-meta-anal...
[2] http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour...
[1] http://training.cochrane.org/resource/introduction-meta-anal...
[2] http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour...
This sounds like p-hacking. They're testing for significance, and when that fails, use the same data again along with other data to achieve significance. Am I mistaken?