Specifies the number of studies evaluated orselected
Steps, and targets of constructing a good review article are listed in Table 3 . To write a good review article the items in Table 3 should be implemented step by step. [ 11 – 13 ]
Steps of a systematic review
Formulation of researchable questions | Select answerable questions |
Disclosure of studies | Databases, and key words |
Evaluation of its quality | Quality criteria during selection of studies |
Synthesis | Methods interpretation, and synthesis of outcomes |
It might be helpful to divide the research question into components. The most prevalently used format for questions related to the treatment is PICO (P - Patient, Problem or Population; I-Intervention; C-appropriate Comparisons, and O-Outcome measures) procedure. For example In female patients (P) with stress urinary incontinence, comparisons (C) between transobturator, and retropubic midurethral tension-free band surgery (I) as for patients’ satisfaction (O).
In a systematic review on a focused question, methods of investigation used should be clearly specified.
Ideally, research methods, investigated databases, and key words should be described in the final report. Different databases are used dependent on the topic analyzed. In most of the clinical topics, Medline should be surveyed. However searching through Embase and CINAHL can be also appropriate.
While determining appropriate terms for surveying, PICO elements of the issue to be sought may guide the process. Since in general we are interested in more than one outcome, P, and I can be key elements. In this case we should think about synonyms of P, and I elements, and combine them with a conjunction AND.
One method which might alleviate the workload of surveying process is “methodological filter” which aims to find the best investigation method for each research question. A good example of this method can be found in PubMed interface of Medline. The Clinical Queries tool offers empirically developed filters for five different inquiries as guidelines for etiology, diagnosis, treatment, prognosis or clinical prediction.
As an indispensable component of the review process is to discriminate good, and bad quality researches from each other, and the outcomes should be based on better qualified researches, as far as possible. To achieve this goal you should know the best possible evidence for each type of question The first component of the quality is its general planning/design of the study. General planning/design of a cohort study, a case series or normal study demonstrates variations.
A hierarchy of evidence for different research questions is presented in Table 4 . However this hierarchy is only a first step. After you find good quality research articles, you won’t need to read all the rest of other articles which saves you tons of time. [ 14 ]
Determination of levels of evidence based on the type of the research question
I | Systematic review of Level II studies | Systematic review of Level II studies | Systematic review of Level II studies | Systematic review of Level II studies |
II | Randomized controlled study | Crross-sectional study in consecutive patients | Initial cohort study | Prospective cohort study |
III | One of the following: Non-randomized experimental study (ie. controlled pre-, and post-test intervention study) Comparative studies with concurrent control groups (observational study) (ie. cohort study, case-control study) | One of the following: Cross-sectional study in non-consecutive case series; diagnostic case-control study | One of the following: Untreated control group patients in a randomized controlled study, integrated cohort study | One of the following: Retrospective cohort study, case-control study (Note: these are most prevalently used types of etiological studies; for other alternatives, and interventional studies see Level III |
IV | Case series | Case series | Case series or cohort studies with patients at different stages of their disease states |
Rarely all researches arrive at the same conclusion. In this case a solution should be found. However it is risky to make a decision based on the votes of absolute majority. Indeed, a well-performed large scale study, and a weakly designed one are weighed on the same scale. Therefore, ideally a meta-analysis should be performed to solve apparent differences. Ideally, first of all, one should be focused on the largest, and higher quality study, then other studies should be compared with this basic study.
In conclusion, during writing process of a review article, the procedures to be achieved can be indicated as follows: 1) Get rid of fixed ideas, and obsessions from your head, and view the subject from a large perspective. 2) Research articles in the literature should be approached with a methodological, and critical attitude and 3) finally data should be explained in an attractive way.
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Scientific discovery is one of the most sophisticated human activities. First, scientists must understand the existing knowledge and identify a significant gap.
Next, they must formulate a research question and design and conduct an experiment in pursuit of an answer.
Then, they must analyse and interpret the results of the experiment, which may raise yet another research question.
Can a process this complex be automated? Last week, Sakana AI Labs announced the creation of an "AI scientist" – an artificial intelligence system they claim can make scientific discoveries in the area of machine learning in a fully automated way.
Using generative large language models (LLMs) like those behind ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, the system can brainstorm, select a promising idea, code new algorithms, plot results, and write a paper summarising the experiment and its findings, complete with references.
Sakana claims the AI tool can undertake the complete lifecycle of a scientific experiment at a cost of just US$15 per paper – less than the cost of a scientist's lunch.
These are some big claims. Do they stack up? And even if they do, would an army of AI scientists churning out research papers with inhuman speed really be good news for science?
A lot of science is done in the open, and almost all scientific knowledge has been written down somewhere (or we wouldn't have a way to "know" it). Millions of scientific papers are freely available online in repositories such as arXiv and PubMed .
LLMs trained with this data capture the language of science and its patterns. It is therefore perhaps not at all surprising that a generative LLM can produce something that looks like a good scientific paper – it has ingested many examples that it can copy.
What is less clear is whether an AI system can produce an interesting scientific paper. Crucially, good science requires novelty.
Scientists don't want to be told about things that are already known. Rather, they want to learn new things, especially new things that are significantly different from what is already known. This requires judgement about the scope and value of a contribution.
The Sakana system tries to address interestingness in two ways. First, it "scores" new paper ideas for similarity to existing research (indexed in the Semantic Scholar repository). Anything too similar is discarded.
Second, Sakana's system introduces a " peer review " step – using another LLM to judge the quality and novelty of the generated paper. Here again, there are plenty of examples of peer review online on sites such as openreview.net that can guide how to critique a paper. LLMs have ingested these, too.
Feedback is mixed on Sakana AI's output. Some have described it as producing " endless scientific slop ".
Even the system's own review of its outputs judges the papers weak at best. This is likely to improve as the technology evolves, but the question of whether automated scientific papers are valuable remains.
The ability of LLMs to judge the quality of research is also an open question. My own work (soon to be published in Research Synthesis Methods ) shows LLMs are not great at judging the risk of bias in medical research studies, though this too may improve over time.
Sakana's system automates discoveries in computational research, which is much easier than in other types of science that require physical experiments. Sakana's experiments are done with code, which is also structured text that LLMs can be trained to generate.
AI researchers have been developing systems to support science for decades. Given the huge volumes of published research, even finding publications relevant to a specific scientific question can be challenging.
Specialised search tools make use of AI to help scientists find and synthesise existing work. These include the above-mentioned Semantic Scholar, but also newer systems such as Elicit , Research Rabbit , scite and Consensus .
Text mining tools such as PubTator dig deeper into papers to identify key points of focus, such as specific genetic mutations and diseases, and their established relationships. This is especially useful for curating and organising scientific information.
Machine learning has also been used to support the synthesis and analysis of medical evidence, in tools such as Robot Reviewer . Summaries that compare and contrast claims in papers from Scholarcy help to perform literature reviews.
All these tools aim to help scientists do their jobs more effectively, not to replace them.
While Sakana AI states it doesn't see the role of human scientists diminishing, the company's vision of "a fully AI-driven scientific ecosystem" would have major implications for science.
One concern is that, if AI-generated papers flood the scientific literature, future AI systems may be trained on AI output and undergo model collapse . This means they may become increasingly ineffectual at innovating.
However, the implications for science go well beyond impacts on AI science systems themselves.
There are already bad actors in science, including "paper mills" churning out fake papers . This problem will only get worse when a scientific paper can be produced with US$15 and a vague initial prompt.
The need to check for errors in a mountain of automatically generated research could rapidly overwhelm the capacity of actual scientists. The peer review system is arguably already broken , and dumping more research of questionable quality into the system won't fix it.
Science is fundamentally based on trust. Scientists emphasise the integrity of the scientific process so we can be confident our understanding of the world (and now, the world's machines) is valid and improving.
Karin Verspoor , Dean, School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University, RMIT University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .
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How to review a paper. A good peer review requires disciplinary expertise, a keen and critical eye, and a diplomatic and constructive approach. Credit: dmark/iStockphoto. As junior scientists develop their expertise and make names for themselves, they are increasingly likely to receive invitations to review research manuscripts.
Research assistant professor, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon. I started writing the review 'Biosynthesis of inorganic nanomaterials using microbial cells and ...
The trend in science is for authors to receive more citations from their review articles than from their original research articles. According to Miranda and Garcia-Carpintero [ 14 ], review articles are, on average, three times more frequently cited than original research articles; they also asserted that a 20% increase in review authorship ...
With research accelerating at an unprecedented speed in recent years and more and more original papers being published, review articles have become increasingly important as a means to keep up-to-date with developments in a particular area of research. A good review article provides readers with an in-depth understanding of a field and ...
A good review article provides readers with an in-depth understanding of a field and highlights key gaps and challenges to address with future research. Writing a review article also helps to expand the writer's knowledge of their specialist area and to develop their analytical and communication skills, amongst other benefits. Thus, the ...
The ideal topic should be focused enough to be manageable but with a large enough body of available research to justify the need for a review article. One article on the topic of scientific reviews suggests that at least 15 to 20 relevant research papers published within the ... The art and science of writing a scientific review article ...
A well-written review article must summarize key research findings, reference must-read articles, describe current areas of agreement as well as controversies and debates, point out gaps in current knowledge, depict unanswered questions, and suggest directions for future research ( 1 ). During the last decades, there has been a great expansion ...
4. Other, lesser suggestions and final comments. Now, read your review carefully, and preferably aloud: if you stumble when reciting your own text, then readers will probably do the same. Reading ...
Examples of literature reviews. Step 1 - Search for relevant literature. Step 2 - Evaluate and select sources. Step 3 - Identify themes, debates, and gaps. Step 4 - Outline your literature review's structure. Step 5 - Write your literature review.
Writing the Review. 1Good scientific writing tells a story, so come up with a logical structure for your paper, with a beginning, middle, and end. Use appropriate headings and sequencing of ideas to make the content flow and guide readers seamlessly from start to finish.
Literature reviews are in great demand in most scientific fields. Their need stems from the ever-increasing output of scientific publications .For example, compared to 1991, in 2008 three, eight, and forty times more papers were indexed in Web of Science on malaria, obesity, and biodiversity, respectively .Given such mountains of papers, scientists cannot be expected to examine in detail every ...
Guidelines for writing a systematic review. 1. Introduction. A key feature of any academic activity is to have a sufficient understanding of the subject area under investigation and thus an awareness of previous research. Undertaking a literature review with an analysis of the results on a specific issue is required to demonstrate sufficient ...
Think about structuring your review like an inverted pyramid. Put the most important information at the top, followed by details and examples in the center, and any additional points at the very bottom. Here's how your outline might look: 1. Summary of the research and your overall impression. In your own words, summarize what the manuscript ...
Many research disciplines feature high-impact journals that are dedicated outlets for review papers (or review-conceptual combinations) (e.g., Academy of Management Review, Psychology Bulletin, Medicinal Research Reviews).The rationale for such outlets is the premise that research integration and synthesis provides an important, and possibly even a required, step in the scientific process.
International Journal of Basic and Applied Science, V ol. 03, No. 01, July 2014, pp. 47-56. ... key to a good literature review or research paper is the abi lity to present the findings in such a ...
Start by reading the paper thoroughly and gaining a clear understanding of its content. Take note of the research question, methodology, data analysis, results, and conclusions. Identify any areas where you have expertise or concerns. 3. Evaluate the Paper's Structure and Clarity:
As a general rule, most journals ask that a specific font and size be used (e.g., Times New Roman, 12 point), that 1.0-inch margins be used on all four sides, and 1.5 line spacing be used. The article structure should contain very specific sections, which might vary slightly according to different science disciplines.
This paper discusses literature review as a methodology for conducting research and offers an overview of different types of reviews, as well as some guidelines to how to both conduct and evaluate a literature review paper. It also discusses common pitfalls and how to get literature reviews published. 1.
Maria Watson is a PhD candidate in the Urban and Regional Science program at Texas A&M University. Her research interests include disaster recovery, public policy, and economic development. Literature reviews establish the foundation of academic inquires. However, in the planning field, we lack rigorous systematic reviews.
The manuscript peer review process helps ensure scientific publications are credible and minimizes errors. Peer review is an essential element of the scientific publishing process that helps ensure that research articles are evaluated, critiqued, and improved before release into the academic community. Take a look at the significance of peer review in scientific publications, the typical steps ...
It creates an understanding of the topic for the reader by discussing the findings presented in recent research papers. A review paper is not a "term paper" or book report. ... Science in the "Perspectives" and "Reviews" sections. Nature in the "News and Views" section. Compilations of reviews such as:
Briefly summarize what the paper is about and what the findings are. Try to put the findings of the paper into the context of the existing literature and current knowledge. Indicate the significance of the work and if it is novel or mainly confirmatory. Indicate the work's strengths, its quality and completeness.
Read Writing a Research Paper for Your Science Fair Project to learn about the purpose of a research paper and how to write one. Review How to Write a Bibliography in APA and MLA styles With Examples to learn how to properly cite resources in your paper using in-text citations. Answer the following questions to check your learning:
The keyword search resulted in 1353 articles including research article, conference paper, review article, conference review, book chapter, and book as shown in Table 1. Table 1. ... Science of The Total Environment, 655 (2019), pp. 395-407, 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.11.070.
Review of Educational Research 80(1): 71-107. Crossref. Web of Science. Google Scholar. Alexander P (2020) Methodological guidance paper: the art and science of quality systematic reviews. Review of Educational Research 90(1): 6-23. ... Research Papers in Education 30(3): 287-304.
The fundamental rationale of writing a review article is to make a readable synthesis of the best literature sources on an important research inquiry or a topic. This simple definition of a review article contains the following key elements: The question (s) to be dealt with.
Assembling such a global stocktake of effective climate policy interventions is so far hampered by two main obstacles: First, even though there is a plethora of data on legislative frameworks and pledged national emission reductions (8-10), systematic and cross-nationally comparable data about the specific types and mixes of implemented policy instruments are lacking.
2024 4th International Conference on Electronic Information Engineering and Computer Science (EIECS 2024) will be held on September 27-29, 2024 in Yanji, China. Conference Website: https://ais.cn ...
The advancement in ultrafast science opened a window to see the ultrafast dynamics of matter span from the material phase transitions, molecular, atomic, and electronic motions in real time (1-8).This capability has been extended to include the space dimensions by developing ultrafast x-ray and electron imaging tools (9-11).Ultrafast electron microscopy (UEM) is one of these crucial tools ...
The peer review system is arguably already broken, and dumping more research of questionable quality into the system won't fix it. Science is fundamentally based on trust. Scientists emphasise the integrity of the scientific process so we can be confident our understanding of the world (and now, the world's machines) is valid and improving.