The summary of the last two paragraphs is wonderful, and I personally find it very interesting.
1, literature review
Literature review (abbreviated as review) is an academic paper that collects a large amount of data on topics, problems or research topics in a certain field, a certain specialty or a certain direction, and comprehensively introduces and expounds the latest progress, academic viewpoints or suggestions in this field through analysis, reading, sorting out and refining.
Traditional review writing has no fixed format and writing process, no strict data statistical analysis process, and no unified evaluation into the research quality standards. Its quality is greatly influenced by the author's professional level, the breadth of data collection and the quality of collected documents, so it is impossible to quantitatively analyze the total effect of intervention measures. In most cases, the author first objectively displays the research results of the literature, and then comprehensively summarizes and interprets the literature according to his own subjective understanding.
2. Systematic evaluation
Systematic review (also called systematic evaluation) refers to the process of applying clear methods to query, select and strictly evaluate related research, extracting data from it, and combining the data with appropriate statistical methods to draw comprehensive conclusions. In order to provide evidence for solving specific clinical problems.
Others define systematic review as reducing bias by using some strategies or analytical methods, and strictly summarizing and analyzing all the studies on specific issues, with or without meta-analysis. Systematic review does not require meta-analysis. A systematic review of meta-analysis of many studies is called quantitative systematic review, while a systematic review of descriptive analysis without meta-analysis is called qualitative systematic review.
3. Meta-analysis
Meta-analysis is defined as a statistical method that combines several research results into a single estimate in literature evaluation. Simply put, meta-analysis is a statistical method, including completely random design and factorial design.
However, there are also different views that the definition of meta-analysis should be broader and equal to systematic review. This idea is widely used in literary titles, and we can often see that the title of an article is "Meta-analysis of a problem". However, it should be noted that meta-analysis cannot be equated with system review, and system review with meta-merger can only be called meta-analysis, otherwise it can only be called system review.
After understanding the concepts of the three, I think everyone is not very clear about their relationship. The popular explanation is this: a long time ago, only a summary, no matter how well written or how badly written, was caused by the author's level, just like eating a plate of mutton in a hot pot, called mutton. Then one day I went to eat hot pot again, and the waiter asked you whether you wanted ordinary mutton or superior mutton. So there is a systematic review. Nominally, they claim that they "have a clearer research purpose, guaranteed research scheme, retrieval strategy, access standards, evaluation of literature quality, and the method of collecting statistics ..." In short, they are top-quality mutton. Almost at the same time that high-quality mutton appeared, the restaurant also introduced high-quality mutton hind legs, so we went to the restaurant and had more "happy" consumption methods. They claimed that the high-quality sheep hind leg meat came from a special supply area in northwest China, and the consistency and comparability between groups were good. They adopted advanced and fine cutting methods and summarized the representative and authentic high-quality conclusions of this dish.
From review to systematic review to meta-analysis, it's like eating hot pot, from mutton to fine mutton and then to the hind leg meat of fine mutton. The upgrade is of course good, understandable and unquestionable! However, the upgrade must have "conscience quality", and if it is "fine mutton", the requirements must be strictly implemented in the production process; It is "high-quality sheep's hind leg meat", and it is necessary to objectively explain every detail in its production process, such as the reasonable standard of literature entry and discharge, the evaluation of heterogeneity, the identification and control of various biases, and so on.