I agree that in general meta analysis stands apart, but I brought it up because it’s so often coupled with a deep review of material like a review article would hold. It’s also totally valid to cite a review article as a primary source, but I tend not to prefer this in my writing. My reasons for this are two fold, first, one of my memories was a curmudgeon who insisted on going all the way back through any chain if claims and citations to find, originally source, and reevaluate each claim. And, in doing so, regularly found irregularities and misattributed statements or just straight up mysteries of where the hell someone got something from. Its a pita, but it pays to be detail oriented when evaluating claims a domain has just accepted as table stakes.
This litterally happened to me recently where I was trying to figure out how this, fairly well known author had determined the functional form they were fitting to a curve. And like, three or four citations deep and a coffee with a colleague of theirs later, it turns out “they just made that shit up”.
Agreed, and a good literature review will dig up that chain. Although it won’t ever be perfectly accurate since the point is paraphrasing the literature to build a structure around what you’re doing, that doesn’t mean your secondary source understood the original (and their reviewers, who can very much be hit or miss).
And don’t get me started on authors misunderstanding quantitative data, haha. I haven’t been doing much academic research since my kids were born, but the number of “they made that shit up” cases were wild in education research. Like arbitrary spline models, misused propensity score matching, a SEM model with cherry picked factors, you name it.
… And this comment chain is way next level for this community. Hahaha
I agree that in general meta analysis stands apart, but I brought it up because it’s so often coupled with a deep review of material like a review article would hold. It’s also totally valid to cite a review article as a primary source, but I tend not to prefer this in my writing. My reasons for this are two fold, first, one of my memories was a curmudgeon who insisted on going all the way back through any chain if claims and citations to find, originally source, and reevaluate each claim. And, in doing so, regularly found irregularities and misattributed statements or just straight up mysteries of where the hell someone got something from. Its a pita, but it pays to be detail oriented when evaluating claims a domain has just accepted as table stakes.
This litterally happened to me recently where I was trying to figure out how this, fairly well known author had determined the functional form they were fitting to a curve. And like, three or four citations deep and a coffee with a colleague of theirs later, it turns out “they just made that shit up”.
Agreed, and a good literature review will dig up that chain. Although it won’t ever be perfectly accurate since the point is paraphrasing the literature to build a structure around what you’re doing, that doesn’t mean your secondary source understood the original (and their reviewers, who can very much be hit or miss).
And don’t get me started on authors misunderstanding quantitative data, haha. I haven’t been doing much academic research since my kids were born, but the number of “they made that shit up” cases were wild in education research. Like arbitrary spline models, misused propensity score matching, a SEM model with cherry picked factors, you name it.
… And this comment chain is way next level for this community. Hahaha