SebastianBlue
President, International Julian Alvarez Fan Club
- Joined
- 25 Jul 2009
- Messages
- 56,086
To be clear, I wasn’t suggesting that a compilation article is inherently problematic (this isn’t actually a meta-analysis, as that would require actual data analysis, methodological rigour, and stat sig findings, with peer-review and likely revision). I wouldn’t even actually hold it to be a narrative review, for the reasons you and I have outlined.Let me just add something, as someone who is currently carrying out a scoping review for my master's thesis. While it does not involve any original research, it's a perfectly valid method of summarizing the research in a given field and offering insights that individual small-scale studies can't. Systematic reviews and meta-analysis are actually what most decisions in medicine are based on precisely for that reason.
It involves giving a detailed an extensive account of exactly how you conducted the search in order to ensure that no stone was unturned, and the efforts you went to to ensure the reliability and validity of your results. Including but not limited to performing all stages separately with a large team and then discussing any differences in analysis. The methodology stage of the report would include a detailed account of the search terms you used, how many results you found, the criteria you used to include or exclude papers, what data you extracted, and how you intended to synthesize that data with references to various models for each stage. I reckon my methodology section will be approximately 3000 words when I'm finished. Now this isn't a scoping review, but a narrative review should be similarly robust in its methodology is that's the entire paper.
With all of that in mind, I will now copy and paste the entirety of the paper's methodology section:
"A literature review is performed by using the google scholar database."
So yeah, his methodology was "I did a search on Google and picked the papers I liked the look of." That isn't research, it's propaganda.
I was only highlighting that it did not represent primary research and articles like these do need to be carefully scrutinised, as their credibility and relevance largely depends on the cited work.
This was particularly important given the context in which it was entered in to the discussion.