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World J Methodol. May 20, 2021; 11(3): 75-80
Published online May 20, 2021. doi: 10.5662/wjm.v11.i3.75
Rationalising animal research synthesis in orthopaedic literature
Konstantinos Tsikopoulos, Konstantinos Sidiropoulos, Dimitrios Kitridis, Lorenzo Drago, Rakesh Ebnezar, David Lavalette
Konstantinos Tsikopoulos, Rakesh Ebnezar, David Lavalette, Orthopaedic Department, Harrogate and District Foundation Trust, Harrogate HG2 7SX, North Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Konstantinos Sidiropoulos, Orthopaedic Department, General Hospital of Serres, Serres 62120, Greece
Dimitrios Kitridis, First Orthopedic Department of Aristotle University, G. Papanikolaou General Hospital, Thessaloniki 55210, Greece
Lorenzo Drago, Laboratory of Clinical Microbiology, Department of Biochemical Sciences for Health, University of Milan, Milan 20164, Italy
Author contributions: Tsikopoulos K was involved in the study conceptualization and writing of the original draft; Sidiropoulos K contributed to provision of resources and revising of the article; Kitridis D was involved in the generation of figures and project administration; Drago L, Ebenzar R and Lavalette D supervised this project and contributed to revisions of this paper; all authors reviewed and approved the final version of the manuscript.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Konstantinos Tsikopoulos, MD, MSc, Doctor, Senior Researcher, Surgeon, Orthopaedic Department, Harrogate and District Foundation Trust, Lancaster Park Road, Harrogate HG2 7SX, North Yorkshire, United Kingdom. kostastsikop@gmail.com
Received: January 2, 2021
Peer-review started: January 2, 2021
First decision: January 25, 2021
Revised: February 5, 2021
Accepted: March 12, 2021
Article in press: March 12, 2021
Published online: May 20, 2021
Core Tip

Core Tip: Relying on the findings of properly conducted meta-analyses of animal research is crucial, particularly in the paucity of human evidence on crucial orthopaedic topics. It is an undeniable fact that authors tend to encounter a great many challenges when conducting this type of research as they have to address several potential sources of bias. For that reason, we advocate that readers should critically appraise the findings of animal syntheses papers.