Meta-Research Collaborative at NYU Langone is committed to broadening the scientific community’s knowledge about research on research.

What is Meta-Research?

Meta-research (research on research) is a relatively newly defined discipline designed to study research itself and its practices. Whether you are familiar with the term, or not, your own research experiences have most certainly been shaped by the products of meta-research. Topics explored in meta-research cover all aspects of the scientific process, including, but not limited to, methods, publication and peer review models, scientific education, funding, and academic reward systems. If you have read an open access paper, participated in peer review, or written a manuscript data-availability statement (and so much more!), you have experienced the products of meta-research.

To promote robust science, meta-research uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine research practices with the same scientific rigor given to other areas of scientific inquiry. The objective of this approach is to understand and improve how research is performed, communicated, verified, evaluated, incentivized, and supported. By examining research practices, meta-research can help disseminate efficient and effective research policies and to identify and abandon wasteful ones. The use of meta-research is far reaching with topics explored in meta-research covering all aspects of the scientific process.

As the topics explored within meta-research are broad, to better categorize meta-research efforts, it has been proposed that the discipline be divided into the following themes:

• methods: how research is performed, e.g. study design, analytic approaches, research ethics
• reporting: how research is communicated, e.g. reporting standards, information sharing, conflict of interest reporting
• replicability and reproducibility: how research is verified or replicated, e.g. methods of data sharing, efforts to reproduce previous studies
• evaluation: how research is evaluated, e.g. peer review, funding criteria, research impact
• incentives: how research is rewarded or supported, e.g. promotion criteria, developing research capacity
• organization: how research is organized or categorized, e.g. research categorization, interactions between disciplines

The questions found in meta-research are often answered with many of the same methods used to address other scientific inquiries, whether it be through experimentation, observation, or literature synthesis.

Who Does Meta-Research?

Meta-research is performed by a wide range of individuals including, but not limited to, researchers, librarians, administrators, and content experts. However, many people working on meta-research do not call what they are doing “meta-research”. Far more individuals and groups are working on meta-research than is explicitly acknowledged.

How Can I Identify Meta-Research?

Despite its far-reaching impact, the visibility and accessibility of meta-research as a field has been limited by the lack of a consistent and standardized way of categorizing meta-research. Researchers have been performing meta-research for decades on a number of topics and in a variety of disciplines; however, few studies have explicitly self-identified as meta-research or used terms such as “meta-research,” “meta-science,” or “research on research” at any point within their publications or defined keywords.

In 2025, a meta-research MeSH term was introduced. The introduction of this term aims to increase the visibility of meta-research by allowing for more searchability and identification of meta-research even when not explicitly containing “meta-research” or an equivalent keyword. The MeSH term will be used for indexing future articles in PubMed.

The new MeSH term “Meta-Research” is defined in PubMed as: “A discipline designed to study research itself and its practices. To promote robust science, meta-research uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine research practices with the same scientific rigor given to other areas of scientific inquiry. The objective of this approach is to understand and improve how research is performed, communicated, verified, evaluated, and incentivized.”