The search starts out of curiosity, to try to find out how something works or to verify that a given thing is actually as it has always been thought to be. It is called basic research, and is based on the whole scientific and technological world. In the biomedical field it is mainly done in laboratories and usually concerns cell cultures, biochemical experiments, microscopes, spectroscopes and reagent-stained lab coats. This is the so-called pre-clinical research.
It can be in vitro if done in test tubes or on cell cultures (that is the real basic research) or in vivo if it is about experiments on animals (which often tries to give some application, even if coarse).
The development of a drug, for example, begins like this: one molecule is synthesized, it is tested on cells and then on animals, if it passes these tests it is tested on humans. Doing research on human beings, however, is not just about drugs: it opens up a wide range of possibilities.
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Imagine we are researchers who do not do laboratory research but clinical research. We have two main paths to follow: do some kind of intervention (experimental studies) or limit ourselves to observe what happens spontaneously (observation studies) and, in the latter case, we can decide to simply describe what happens in a population (descriptive studies) or make a comparison between two populations (analytical studies). The choice will drastically change our relevance factor, but also the costs and times of our research.
The argument, as we can see, is quite complicated and that is why in the evaluation of a scientific study it serves competence. Although it may seem obvious to trust the conclusions of a research, it is not always the case, because the elements to be evaluated are many.
In the next part of the article I will try to describe the meaning of each type of study, what it is for and why it is born (and what conclusions I can draw from it).
The publications
Clinical research
There is a whole series of works concerning clinical research and epidemiology, all of which are important for better understanding the reality that surrounds us. The following scheme is the one published in Lancet in 2002 which summarizes, in broad terms, what we do in research.
Author:Lorenzo Mignani