Search across guide titles, topics, keywords, and content throughout the Researcher's Field Guide.
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A suspicious result can justify scrutiny without justifying an accusation of misconduct. Learn how to separate what you observed from what you infer about its cause.
Read Guide →Research studies do not always reach the same conclusion, and disagreement does not automatically mean that one study is wrong. Learn how to compare apparently conflicting findings and judge what the wider body of evidence actually supports.
Read Guide →A striking new study can change what researchers think, but publication date alone does not give it authority over everything that came before. The important question is how much the new evidence should change your confidence in the existing conclusion.
Read Guide →Newer research is not automatically better research. Publication date can matter when methods, technologies, populations, or contexts have changed, but the evidential value of a study depends primarily on what it investigated and how well it did so.
Read Guide →Research studies should not receive equal weight merely because they appear in the same literature review. Learn how to judge which evidence should influence your conclusion more without relying on shortcuts such as sample size, recency, journal prestige, or a simple hierarchy of study designs.
Read Guide →A majority of studies does not automatically represent the strongest evidence. When the most credible studies point in a different direction, examine why the pattern occurs and whether methodological limitations could explain the apparent majority.
Read Guide →Methodological quality should strongly influence how much weight you give a paper because flaws in conduct can systematically distort its results. But quality should be assessed through relevant sources of bias, not reduced to a vague impression or simple numerical score.
Read Guide →Some studies legitimately deserve more weight than others, but the reasons should be methodological rather than based on whether you like their findings. Use explicit criteria, apply them consistently, and show readers how each judgment affects your conclusion.
Read Guide →Separate papers do not necessarily represent separate evidence. Studies can share participants, datasets, cohorts, research teams, or underlying projects, making apparent replication less independent than it looks.
Read Guide →A frequently cited interpretation is not necessarily supported by equally abundant independent evidence. Citation networks can amplify particular claims while contradictory findings or the limited evidence beneath them become less visible.
Read Guide →Publication bias occurs when whether a study becomes publicly available is related to its results. This can leave the visible literature looking more positive, consistent, or convincing than the complete evidence actually is.
Read Guide →Selective outcome reporting occurs when some measured outcomes are reported more completely than others because of their results. A published paper can therefore present only a favorable slice of what the study actually found.
Read Guide →The same dataset can often be analyzed in several defensible ways. Selective analysis reporting becomes a problem when the version that gets reported is chosen because it produced the preferred result.
Read Guide →Time-lag bias occurs when the speed of publication depends on what a study found. Positive findings may therefore enter the visible literature sooner, making early evidence look more favorable than the fuller evidence that emerges later.
Read Guide →Language bias can arise when the language in which research is published is associated with its findings, while language restrictions can determine which evidence a review retrieves. Both issues can leave a literature review with an unrepresentative evidence base.
Read Guide →Citation bias occurs when whether research gets cited depends partly on what it found. If supportive or statistically significant studies receive more citations, they can become easier to encounter and appear more dominant than the complete evidence warrants.
Read Guide →Prestige can act as a shortcut for deciding which research deserves attention. When researchers notice or trust papers partly because of who wrote them or where they appeared, less prestigious but relevant evidence can become easier to overlook.
Read Guide →Research databases do not contain identical slices of the scholarly literature. When indexing and database coverage are associated with study characteristics or findings, the evidence researchers retrieve can differ from the evidence that actually exists.
Read Guide →One study can generate several publications, and those reports are not always easy to recognize as belonging to the same underlying research. Counting overlapping data as independent evidence can give some findings too much weight.
Read Guide →Knowing that some research may be missing is only the beginning. The harder question is whether a plausible amount and pattern of missing evidence could materially change the effect estimate, certainty, direction, or practical interpretation of the conclusion.
Read Guide →Statistical methods can explore how missing research might affect a synthesis, but they cannot perfectly reconstruct studies whose existence and results are unknown. Correction therefore depends on assumptions rather than recovery of the hidden evidence.
Read Guide →A literature review becomes overwhelming when papers, notes, and ideas accumulate without a system. Learn how to organize sources around research questions and themes so your reading can turn into synthesis rather than a pile of summaries.
Read Guide →Good literature review notes capture more than a paper's findings. Record enough information to identify the source, understand what the study did and found, evaluate its relevance, and use it accurately when you begin synthesizing the literature.
Read Guide →Your PDFs, notes, and citations should function as connected parts of one research system rather than separate collections. A stable source record can serve as the link between what you downloaded, what you learned, and what you eventually cite.
Read Guide →One study can generate several papers, abstracts, protocols, follow-up reports, and secondary analyses. Track the study as the underlying unit while keeping each publication linked to it.
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