I agree that in general meta analysis stands apart, but I brought it up because it’s so often coupled with a deep review of material like a review article would hold. It’s also totally valid to cite a review article as a primary source, but I tend not to prefer this in my writing. My reasons for this are two fold, first, one of my memories was a curmudgeon who insisted on going all the way back through any chain if claims and citations to find, originally source, and reevaluate each claim. And, in doing so, regularly found irregularities and misattributed statements or just straight up mysteries of where the hell someone got something from. Its a pita, but it pays to be detail oriented when evaluating claims a domain has just accepted as table stakes.

This litterally happened to me recently where I was trying to figure out how this, fairly well known author had determined the functional form they were fitting to a curve. And like, three or four citations deep and a coffee with a colleague of theirs later, it turns out “they just made that shit up”.