Respected RG members,
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses rank first on the hierarchy of evidence; however, does this imply that they are more favorable than original research and that we, as researchers, should focus more on conducting them?
Your participation is appreciated!
Reviews and original research often go hand-in-hand. To understand how to best design original research, one needs to review the literature. Once one has mastered the literature, a review article is half-done; the researcher just needs to write it up. This can done before or after conducting the original research.
If you look at the authors of highly cited review articles and meta-analyses, you'll see that they usually do original research in these exact topics.
Thank you so much David Dunaetz for your contribution to this discussion, I agree with you, this is a possibility.
Thank you Ishita Virmani
for your contribution. Yes you are right.
I agree with David Dunaetz both systematic reviews and original research studies go hand-in-hand. Conducting an SLR in the original research study, for example, is a common strategy to consolidate the literature review part of the original research paper.
Thank you so much Rami Alkhudary for your contribution. Truly appreciated.
Well< I wrote a systematic review and 25000 people so far have read it and it seems to have encouraged some original research in others, as well as the fat I m going to do some myself from gaps I found in Knowledge. so I would say both can be very useful> I am soon going to embark on a field where there is so little known that a systematic review would be impossible. How about "follow your heart".
Thank you so much Julia Wermig-Morgan for sharing your experience. "Follow your heart" such a nice quote.
Referring back to the EBM triangle, although systematic reviews and meta-analyses are on top of the triangle, they may not necessarily be always better than original (primary) researches (i.e. RCT, cohort, case-control).
For example, the evidence level of systematic reviews of cohort studies are below than RCT, and the evidence level of systematic reviews of case-control studies are below than cohort studies, and so on.
I agree with David Dunaetz and Rami Alkhudary . The need for reviews increases as the number of original researches increases, and the need for original studies with higher quality evidence increases as the number of original researches and reviews with lower quality of evidence increases. When the number of published reviews are high, it is also plausible to perform a review of reviews in some cases.
I hope that helps
Gilbert Lazarus, thank you so much for sharing your opinion, you have a good point of view as well which is appreciated and acknowledged.
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