Only a tiny proportion of medical research breaks entirely new ground, and an equally tiny proportion repeats exactly the steps of previous workers. The vast majority of research studies will tell us, at best, that a particular hypothesis is slightly more or less likely to be correct than it was before we added our piece to the wider jigsaw. Hence, it may be perfectly valid to do a study which is, on the face of it, “unoriginal.” Indeed, the whole science of meta-analysis depends on the literature containing more than one study that has addressed a question in much the same way.