• fossilesque@mander.xyzOP
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    2 days ago

    I find them extremely useful, they are a launching point like Wikipedia. I am currently writing one and this is how I was taught to approach them.

    • jatone@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 days ago

      shrug. I’ve never found them useful even for broad scope information. you should perhaps be more upset that the piss poor studies they’re based on are being published to begin with. which is what caused systematic reviews to be useful. =)

      • fossilesque@mander.xyzOP
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        2 days ago

        Haha, well it isn’t that simple. I use them more for the humanities to condense complex topics down to major principles. We also use them as teaching tools, for people that likely won’t continue in academia. The big problem with these tends to be in the harder sciences, unfortunately. There are some journals which are extremely trustworthy for them due to the process of submissions, like Annual Reviews. These ones tend to be invite only though. Lots of people use systematic reviews as lit reviews too to launch off their own work and identify gaps. But you are not wrong; the issue is with junk science, and I would also like to soapbox here about the lack of education, even in graduate schools, on how to identify journal trustworthiness & prestige.

        • jatone@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 days ago

          =) I get why people find them useful, I tend not to. The good news is that there are fairly easy ways to filter these things without too much overhead. sadly we’ll probably never implement those toolsets because its expensive labor to implement and takes widespread buyin from the community to work effectively. =(