Meta-Research

Our team "meta-research" is headed by Prof. dr. Maurice Zeegers. We serve two Maastricht University Schools (CAPHRI and NUTRIM) in our research activities and teach Systematic Reviews, Statistics, Data Science and Epidemiology for both the faculties Health and Medicine and Science and Engineering.

Meta-research is the use of scientific methodology to study science itself. The academic eco-system is set-up to reward research income, being the first and always creating new datasets. This is a waste. Despite the limited funding and lack of recognition currently associated with meta-research, this is the more sustainable, more efficient and more evidence-based approach to science. We conduct replication-research, meta-analyses, pooled analyses of large datasets and systematic literature reviews to confirm or refute expected cause-effect associations. We also investigate the potential use of AI in scientific writing.

We represent the “Epidemiology” team in NUTRIM, specializing in Prenatal, Nutritional and Genetic Epidemiology and the “Applied Epidemiology” team in CAPHRI in which we perform methodological research and use secondary datasets to improve both real world applications and the scientific process itself.

We offer a fully-remote PhD degree programme for research executives at non-academic research institutes. (Flyer)