Intervention-Prognostic Derivative Research

Abstract

The enormous rate with which original studies for the advancement of the knowledge-base of clinicians’ intervention-prognoses are now being published, creates both an opportunity and a need for its corresponding derivative research; and this derivative research, too, has become dauntingly voluminous, even on closely-demarcated topics. As this is research that draws from original research with critical selectivity, it requires understanding of the quality-assurance of the original studies on a level higher than is characteristic of the ‘peer reviews’ of the reports on these. And it requires a keen sense not only of the generic mission in it but also of its requisite quality-assurance. Eminent examples indicate that the quality of derivative intervention-prognostic studies, even ones commissioned for authoritative promulgation of recommendations for clinicians’ practices, remains quite wanting.