You're Not Doing Research
But here's how to get closer
As a clinician and researcher, something that drives me a little crazy is speaking with parents who arrive at conversations about their child’s treatment plan with firmly held convictions based on their own “research.” When most people say research, they mean they did a Google search, read a news article summarizing a study, and maybe even looked over a peer-reviewed paper or two. Truthfully, I don’t fault anyone for this. Staying informed is great, and coming to a conversation prepared with some background knowledge is always appreciated.
But I want to be clear: what they did isn’t research, and it isn’t a substitute for expertise.
The main problem is confirmation bias. It’s remarkably easy to find a study that confirms what you already hope or believe is true. But science is an argument, not a chorus. For every study pointing in one direction, there is another pointing in the opposite. The truth accumulates slowly through consensus across a large body of work. That means you have to read broadly enough to encounter the full landscape of a topic, beyond what appeared in your first search. And breadth alone isn’t sufficient. You have to read critically, weighing things like study design, author credentials, sample size, recency, and risk of bias. So–setting aside the difficulty of doing research–evaluating it is a genuine skill that takes time to develop.
So what should a non-expert actually do? My recommendation is to seek out a systematic review. Unlike a conventional literature summary, a systematic review follows rigorous, transparent methodology. Authors document precisely how studies were identified, what criteria governed their inclusion, and how they evaluated the quality of the evidence. Much of what makes independent research so difficult for a non-specialist is handled for you. And a well-conducted systematic review tells you what the literature says overall, helping make sense of the contradictions within it.
So if you want a simple starting point: open Google Scholar, search “systematic review” alongside whatever topic you’re investigating, and find the most recent one available. It won’t make you an expert, but it will give you a much more solid foundation than a headline.
Leaving you this week with "Body Electric" from Fame. Enjoy!