Here on Skeptoid, as you know, we back everything up with published scientific studies, whenever

they're available, and they're listed on the transcript pages on the website.

But not everyone's familiar with scientific studies, and so today we've got a really

fun little primer on what the basic study types are that you're likely to encounter,

and how to interpret them.

That's today on Skeptoid.

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You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.

An enthusiast's primer on study types.

We don't all work professionally in the hard sciences. In fact, most of us don't.

Yet those of us who are fans of science and its applications are often confronted with evidence

in articles citing studies and other research, and we can sometimes feel a bit of a loss to

understand some of the lingo. One thing I've had to do a lot of in my years of Skeptoid is

reading studies. There are all kinds of different studies, cohort studies, controlled trials,

uncontrolled trials, longitudinal studies, retrospective studies, and many more.

The uninitiated student of studies quickly becomes a wash in a sea of study types.

Today we're going to take a quick helicopter view of study types. As with most lists,

...