Changes

|Resource=Mercuri and Barseghyan (2019)

|Preamble=Growing body of evidence from various fields suggests that often employed methods constitute hierarchies. Thus, scientists from different fields customarily speak of more or less reliable evidence. For instance, to establish the authenticity of a work of art, art historians accept the opinion of the most credible expert. If such an opinion is, for whatever reason, unavailable, art historians often refer to the second-best expert, and so on.[[CiteRef::Loiselle (2017)]] We find similar method hierarchies in the field of ''clinical epidemiology'', where the community has a certain hierarchy of expectations – from stricter to laxer. When evaluating the efficacy of a certain exposure (e.g. a medical therapy, surgical technique, or risk factor), clinical epidemiologists first check if the exposure has been tested in trials that satisfy the strictest requirements. If such trials are not found, they check to see if the exposure has been tested in trials that satisfies the laxer requirements in the hierarchy, and so on. This suggests that employed methods can, at times, have different weights. Despite this accumulating evidence, the very existence of the phenomenon of ''method hierarchy'' is yet to be accepted in scientonomy.

|To Accept Questions=Conceptualizing Method Hierarchies,

|Automatic=No