Replication undoubtedly constitutes an evolving practice. The need to incorporate new data arising from further GWA scans, other replication studies, meta-analyses or all of the above, leads to the emerging paradigm of conglomerate analyses. Field synopses, for example, are efforts to integrate data from diverse sources (GWA studies, consortia, single published studies) in the published literature and to make them publicly available in electronic databases that can be updatable. Examples include the field synopses on Alzheimer’s disease (AlzGene database), schizophrenia (SzGene database) and DNA repair genes.[64, 65] The results of the meta-analyses on the accumulated data can then also be graded for their epidemiological credibility, e.g. as proposed by the Venice criteria.[54]
