Research terms dictionary - Consensus

Keep this page open while you work through the guide. Terms are grouped by when you’ll first meet them.

Finding papers

Term	What it means
Corpus	The set of papers being searched. In Consensus: All, Medical, or My Library, chosen under + › Search corpus.
Peer review	Other experts checked the paper before the journal published it.
Preprint	A paper shared publicly before peer review. Useful for new results, but not yet checked.
Abstract	The short summary at the top of a paper.
Full text	The whole paper: introduction, methods, results, and discussion.
DOI	A permanent ID for a paper, like `10.1000/182`. Paste it into Consensus to find that exact paper.
Citation count	How many other papers cite this one. A rough sign of influence, not of quality.
Seminal paper	A foundational paper that much of a field builds on.
Journal quartile (Q1–Q4)	A journal’s rank within its field. Q1 means the top 25%.
Retracted	Withdrawn after publication, usually because of errors or misconduct. Don’t cite it.

Study types

Term	What it means
RCT (randomized controlled trial)	People are randomly put into a treatment group or a comparison group. The strongest single study for cause and effect.
Cohort study	Follows a group over time to see who develops an outcome.
Case-control study	Compares people who have an outcome with people who don’t, looking back for causes.
Cross-sectional study	A snapshot of a group at one point in time.
Case study / case report	A detailed look at one person, group, or event.
Literature review	A summary of research on a topic, written by an expert.
Systematic review	A review that follows a strict, repeatable method to find and judge every relevant study.
Meta-analysis	Combines the numbers from many studies into one overall result.

Reading results

Term	What it means
Population	Who was studied, such as adults with type 2 diabetes.
Intervention	The treatment or exposure being tested.
Outcome	What was measured to judge the result.
Sample size (n)	How many people or things were studied. Bigger is usually more reliable.
Effect size	How big the difference or relationship is, not just whether one exists.
Statistically significant	Unlikely to be due to chance alone. It doesn’t mean the effect is large or important.
Correlation vs causation	Two things happening together (correlation) doesn’t prove one causes the other (causation).
Confounder	A third factor that could explain a result, such as age or income.
Limitation	A weakness the authors admit, usually near the end of the discussion.

Doing research

Term	What it means
Literature review (the task)	Reading and summarizing what’s known about your topic, usually the first step of a project.
Research gap	A question the research hasn’t answered yet.
Backward citation tracing	Reading the papers a paper cites, to see what it built on.
Forward citation tracing	Reading the papers that cite a paper, to see what came after.
Snowballing	Repeating citation tracing from paper to paper to build a reading list.
PICO	A way to frame a question: Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome.