Systematics in ecologyALEX FILAZZOLACRITICAL THINKING LAB 2

Different types of literature Primary sources – original materials, often empirical testing or experiments.

Examples: - Journal articles - Experimental data - Communications

Different types of literature Secondary sources – interpretations or summarization of primary sources

Examples: - Reviews - Meta-analyses - Commentaries

Different types of literature Tertiary sources – A distillation and collection of primary and secondary sources

Examples: - Encyclopedias - Textbooks - Bibliographies

Different types of literature Grey literature – is information or researched produced by an organization or government.

Examples: - Government documents - Newsletters - Technical reports

Synthesis tools Textbook examples Narrative reviews

Vote counting Combining probabilities

Systematic reviews Meta-analysis

hypothesis orproblem

predictions orqueries

i. summarize knowledge

ii. meta-analysis

Narratives - Reviews written about a subject that are not quantitative

- Relatively easy to write

- Biased towards authors of the article

- Typically written by experts on the subject

- Reviews that are based from a systematic search through the literature of a topic

- More difficult to write, requires reading many articles to make conclusions

- Less biased towards authors, but biased towards the state of the literature

- Written by any researcher

Systematic reviews

- Reviews that are based from statistics conducted on multiple studies

- Difficult because it requires specific data from many articles.

- Generally unbiased, comparing effect sizes rather than studies

- Written by any researcher

Meta-analysis

Choosing search terms - Wild cards (*) to capture different spellings. - Do not truncate - Avoid ambiguity - Common names and latin names - define inclusion material

Refinement techniques - Refine to English language

- Refine to empirical papers and exclude reviews for systematic reviews/meta-analyses

- Refine to countries when targeting a geographic area

- Refine to year when targeting a time frame.