“…Yet, the sample inclusion strategy adopted by Hsiang and coauthors favors form over function by using selection criteria that explicitly disregard studies that revisit previously investigated climateconflict associations, regardless of whether they complement, contrast or correct earlier findings. For example, the country-level relationship between rainfall and civil conflict is represented in the meta-analysis by a single peer-reviewed result (Miguel et al 2004), omitting numerous more recent investigations that reach different conclusions (e.g., Buhaug 2010; Burke et al 2009;Ciccone 2011;Couttenier and Soubeyran 2013;Koubi et al 2012). 4 Moreover, the meta-analysis, and implicitly also the non-technical assessment in Hsiang and Burke, considers just one climate indicator from each study, in many cases the one that indicated the strongest effect, although many of the original studies actually explore multiple alternative and complementary climate measures that sometimes produce contrasting results.…”