IPB Seafast Center Holds Systematic Literature Review and Meta-Analysis Workshop
Agricultural Science and Technology Development Center (Seafast Center), Bogor Agricultural University (IPB) held a workshop titled “How to do a Systematic Literature Review and Meta-Analysis?” at Salak Room, Seafast Center, IPB Dramaga, Bogor (23/07). This workshop was conducted for three days, July 23-25th, 2018. The participants were trained to write literature review in a systematic manner and to learn meta-analysis from the principals and the implementation. The participants in this workshop were graduate students and IPB researchers.
There are many difficulties that researchers often face during writing a systematic literature review and meta-analysis. For example, there is a policy that requires evidence basis, many informations on extensive subjects, and access to information that might be hard to find.
Researchers from Warsaw University of Life Sciences, Poland, Dr. Dominika Srednicka-Tober, as a speaker of this workshop, gave the tips to help researchers to write better systematic literature review and meta-analysis. Dr. Dominika compared traditional review and systematic review. It was shown that systematic review can produce stronger evidence basis when compared to traditional review.
In addition, Dr. Dominika also gave several sources that can be used as a literature review, e.g. Scopus. There were also tips given about how to find corresponding literature review faster.
“As much as 12.529 academic papers are written every year, so ideally we have to read 34 papers everyday. That can be time wasting, so a right method is needed to write a systematic literature review and unbiased meta-analysis,” she said.
According to the other speaker, Dr. Nancy D. Yuliana, from Food Science and Technology Department (ITP), Faculty of Agricultural Technology (Fateta) IPB this program is not only necessary for graduate students. It is also important for lecturers to learn about systematic literature review and meta-analysi to write quality papers which can be cited by academicians. That is what differentiates systematic review with traditional review which only refers to a handful of literatures to see the potential of topic that can be studied and have not been studied yet.
There is fundamental difference between systematic review and meta-analysis. The differences can be seen from the referred datas. Systematic review only uses qualitative analysis, while meta-analysis uses quantitative analysis also. To confirm the effect from the different results written in the scientific paper, both systematic literature review and meta-analysis must be conducted.
Meta-analysis is a quantitative analysis using statistical methods and many datas to find several informations from an expansive topic and to find many other things inside. Similar trainings haven’t much been conducted in Indonesia. This proves that IPB is an institution that keeps on developing its students’ and teaching staffs’ knowledge so that they can write papers with credible literature review, thus can be beneficial for academicians. (Ard)
