Contribution Guidelines

Purpose

The goal of OptimalScience is to provide a way for OptimalWork to coordinate with scientific research. We hope that this will ultimately benefit researchers, especially in psychiatry and neuroscience, by highlighting for them the most fruitful areas of investigation. We hope that OptimalWork will benefit immediately from a more rigorous attention to the latest research findings, which will help us to develop our model further and enhance our credibility.

Principles

We will work with the Oxford Levels of Evidence, as outlined here:

Level Type of evidence 1A Systematic review (with homogeneity) of RCTs 1B Individual RCT (with narrow confidence intervals) 1C All or none study 2A Systematic review (with homogeneity) of cohort studies 2B Individual Cohort study (including low quality RCT, e.g. <80% follow-up) 2C “Outcomes” research; Ecological studies 3A Systematic review (with homogeneity) of case-control studies 3B Individual Case-control study 4 Case series (and poor quality cohort and case-control study) 5 Expert opinion without explicit critical appraisal or based on physiology bench research or “first principles”

• From the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, [1].