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When I began my PhD program in the Department of Psychology, one of my main research goals was to write a review article. I had often found during my Master’s program (Miami University in Ohio, USA) that good review articles in my field (animal behavior and cognition) really helped me gain knowledge on the given review topic, find other relevant papers, and see the types of research questions people in my field are asking— and, perhaps most importantly— have yet to ask! Furthermore, I had one professor mention that writing a review paper was extremely helpful in his academic development and was, in fact, still his most cited research— and getting good publications during my PhD was definitely a goal of mine!
From the start I sought to make the first chapter of my dissertation a review of some sort and communicated such to my advisor. I took an “Introduction to Systematic Review Searching” course put on by the John W. Scott Health Sciences Library here on campus and learned a lot from it. My advisor ended up pushing me a step further to not just do a review paper, but to conduct a meta-analysis: the collecting and analyzing of data from the papers I would be reviewing. I was a bit hesitant at first, because I had recently published a meta-analysis that was fairly small in scope, and the fear of pursuing a meta-analysis on the scale of the topic I was interested in for my PhD was intimidating. However, it was worth it— let me explain why.
Conducting a meta-analysis requires mastering a topic and provides a strong foundation for a successful PhD
My background prior to my PhD was in biology, and specifically animal conservation and behavior. For my Master’s degree I studied the social and mating lives of prairie voles, which are small social rodents. With such a background, most of my knowledge was from a biological perspective— the behaviors animals do, why they do them, and how animals interact with their environments and each other. For my PhD I was interested in researching animal cognition— what animals learn and understand—and ended up in the Department of Psychology here at the University of Alberta. This required learning an entirely new lexicon, attending a few undergraduate courses in this new field to get my bearings, and just generally becoming versed in a new field. Doing a meta-analysis was a key piece of this learning process.
As I searched for papers on my topic of choice, I had to learn the terms used in this field to find the papers I needed. Perhaps even more significantly, I had to learn the various methods people used in their research and why they used these methods. In my case, this meant learning about the variety of ways people examine the learning abilities of animal including a wide range of tests previously unfamiliar to me like ‘Morris Water Mazes,’ ‘T-Mazes,’ color discrimination tasks, and more.
I also learned a lot about the history of the field, and I was never one who especially enjoyed history and remembering names and dates. But, doing meta-analysis research required that I read papers old and new, including influential papers of the past that have shaped how much of the field has gone since, and gave me perspective and where the field was and where it is now.
The knowledge I gained doing my meta-analysis has been essential in all that I have done since. Additionally, a great meta-analysis can be a great publication; in my case, I was (after a year of reviews!) able to publish in a great journal and I think my work will be beneficial to many authors across a variety of disciplines.
Conducting a meta-analysis requires learning a lot of new analytical tools
The process of getting my meta-analysis published was, well, anything but easy to say the least. I first learned how to do a variety of statistical analyses that was well beyond anything I’d done before, but I learned and figured it out! Seven months after my manuscript had been submitted and gone through one round of revisions, we had another review by a statistical expert and I had to redo a portion of my analyses using different methods! Now, statistically/mathematically-minded people may not be intimidated by such tasks, but I will definitely say it was a challenge for me. However, with some help I was able to do the new analyses, submit the paper, and ultimately get it published.
Meta-analyses help us better understand the world
Another benefit I’ve found from my meta-analysis is the usefulness of learning about what meta-analyses are and their utility. Psychology has undergone a replication crisis, in part because people have long taken single studies as clear evidence of a phenomenon. Meta-analyses serve an important tool in science as a method to cut through the claims of any one study and rather see if a hypothesis holds up by accumulating evidence from many studies examining specific claims.
For my meta-analysis, I was interested in how the environment that animals grow up in or experience affects their abilities to learn. Over 50 years of research has been done on this question, often comparing animals raised in more enriched environments to those raised in more simple environments. Some studies found that animals raised in enriched environments seem to have better learning abilities, and many researchers have been under the assumption that the social environment animals experience has especially important effects on animals’ learning abilities. However, my meta-analysis did not find this to be the case; while enriched environments do result in better learning abilities, the social environment was not especially important compared to other environmental features. Of course this does not mean the social environment is not important for some species— the social environment is almost certainly integral for cognitive development in human and other highly social species— but I found that this is not a species-wide phenomenon.
Overall, meta-analyses can be helpful in clarifying, and even changing, our previous understanding of a wide variety of phenomena. I have found this especially helpful in times of Covid; with so much information regarding the pandemic being produced, good meta-analyses provide powerful (statistically and figuratively) insights into many aspects of health and medicine. It is very satisfying to be able to understand a bit better the data from these medical meta-analyses, and in turn to have provided my own research that others in my field will hopefully benefit from.
About Connor
Connor is a fourth-year PhD student from the United States interested in animal behavior, cognition, and conservation. He is currently studying cognition in birds with Dr. Lauren Guillette in the Animal Cognition Research Group at the University of Alberta in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Science. Connor loves the outdoors, birding, and great movies and books.