Why is meta-research important for the progress of clinical and applied medical research?

Introduction: Metascience and meta-research should ideally pace together. While the first is often recognized as the science of science (lato sensu), the latter is to research science aiming to answer methodological or clinical questions (stricto sensu). Objectives: This concept article aims to provide a framework on how metascience and meta-research, may help decision-makers in their clinical questions daily. Methods and Materials: That will be a narrative piece of research using historical benchmarks that picture how important it is to understand the scientific methodology, by using metascience/meta-research, to mitigate random error as well as systematic errors (biases). Results: In a nutshell, it is fair to acknowledge that for certain domains, to study science was a path to open gateways and recognize the impact of different type of errors in the medical literature - how prevalent they are, how impactful they might be and what we should do in the future. Conclusion: study and research ecosystem characteristics are positively and negatively associated with effect sizes in the medical literature and the prevalence of heterogeneity of findings may vary according to the fields. Further research should focus on new on-trend techniques and how they might bias (or not) studies and, ultimately, the clinical practice - such as real-world data randomized clinical trials, optimized phase I trials, routine collected data to feed data storage systems and others.