Does a Meta-Study contribute to the Body-of-Research and how? The website sciencealert writes the following in one of their entries:


  The new meta-analysis of 20 studies updates the body of research regarding the phenomenon by including studies conducted more recently than 2007...


While I do see the value in a meta-analysis I am a bit unsure how it can add to the body of research since no new information/data is obtained.
It depends on how you define the "body of research". If you see it purely as a collection of all raw data, then no, a a meta-analysis would not contribute to it. However, I would argue that most people use the term "body of knowledge" much more widely, to mean all research that has been conducted and all knowledge that has been generated and published in a field.

In order to be publishable, a meta-analysis should produce new knowledge (e.g., through new experiments or analyses, or by increasing our confidence in previously-published analyses through comparison over a larger sample size), and in that way contribute to the sum of all knowledge in the field, even if no new data points have been collected.