Do you have case studies?

REMEMBER: No “Systematic Review of Literature” articles accepted for this assignment. The article you select to best answer your research question, must pertain to an actual primary research study that the authors conducted. I want the review of literature to be done by you!

Dear Students: You should begin this assignment during Week 3. The due date for this assignment is at the close of class week 4/module 4 on Sunday 2/2/20 @ 11:59 pm. You may submit it anytime during Week3/Module 3 or week 4/module 4. Once submitted, the assignment is eligible for grading.

In order to complete this assignment, you will need to be sure you have finished watching the assigned Library videos during weeks 1 & 2. You should also review the information about determining if an article comes from a peer-reviewed journal. This information is located in the Resource Module for the course.

The purpose of this assignment is twofold:

1). To conduct an online search of the literature though a database in Halle library, to locate empirical literature that specifically addresses the research question you developed about patient education in Week 2.

2). To describe your search process and results in a formal APA paper. You will be selecting a primary research article (again, no systematic reviews, as these are not primary research), after completing your search that you believe best addresses your research question. You will also provide a discussion of the article you select in your paper, and cite it in 6th ed. APA format.

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1) The Online Literature Search:

To begin this assignment, go into the Halle library and select the CINAHL or PubMed database to conduct your search and write about it, – do not use both databases for your paper. Additionally, do not use other, different databases. If you search both to see what you find, select the process and results from only one database to describe in your paper.

In order to conduct your search, you will need your research question, and the key words and key phrases you developed for your research question regarding pain, in Online Discussion #2; (your key words and key phrases may have changed a bit if you received feedback that helped you to refine them – this is perfectly okay!). You will use these to conduct your search. You may find that you need to change, add, or tweak your key words/phrases more as you conduct your search. This is perfectly fine; just remember that you will need to describe what you do to complete your search in your paper.

Think about the delimiters you want to apply to your search in accordance with the type of information you are looking for (for example, English language only, animal studies, human studies, year(s) of publication, research articles only, inpatients only, other?). The limitations you select are up to you, and should be used to help you find articles that will best address your research question.

As you run your search, keep track of what you are doing to refine your search and the results you find at each step, as you will be describing these in your paper.

For example, using my research problem on patient education for Type II Diabetics from the prior module, I could write about how if I start my search simply using the word patient in one search box of CINAHL, and the word education in another search box, 186,066 article results; if I put these two terms together and search “patient education”, I get 63,286 article results. If I use “patient educ*” in one search box and “diabet* manag*” in another, I get 234 article results. This last result is more manageable, but still a bit too big…..Now if I start adding delimiters, such as selecting the Abstract search field (to the right of where you put in your search words in CINAHL; I highly recommend this!), then select English language only, academic journals, published between 2014 and 2019, I get 174 articles, I’d still like to refine my search further. In my paper I would describe how I continued to narrow/broaden/revise my search as needed to arrive at my final pool of articles to review so I may add an additional search term or two). Be sure to take notes as you search and what you do so that you can describe both your process and results in your paper. Additionally, from one day to the next, the # of results may change, as new literature is added to the databases all the time.

Once you feel you have sufficiently narrowed your pool, take a careful look at the articles to see if your search really produced the type of information you need to answer your research question. I usually do this by reading first the titles, and if the article title seems to address my question in some way, then I read the abstract. If you find that you don’t have the information you need, you will need to change your search terms, set different delimiters, etc. and search again. Keep working with this, until you get a good set of articles to cull through that address your research question. You will probably need to narrow and expand your search a few times to find the information you need. (Remember to take notes and keep track of what you are doing and what the results are at each step of the process).

When you are done searching, review your results and note the different types and levels of evidence in the articles; use the information you’ve read about in your text to help you. Also note the different types of research studies in your pool – are they quantitative? qualitative? mixed? Do you have case studies? systematic reviews? cohort studies? interventional studies? You will be describing your final pool of results in your paper.

Lastly, you are to select one primary research article from your results that you think addresses your research question the best. You’ll be discussing this article in your paper. Remember, do NOT select an article that is a systematic review of prior studies; while these are considered highly credible types of evidence, they are not suitable for our purposes here.

2). Writing Your Paper:

To write your paper about your search process, start with a brief introductory paragraph that identifies the purpose and scope of your paper. This means you should identify your research area of interest, the research question you selected and what you will be discussing in your paper — in other words, indicate what topic you searched and the database you conducted your search in, and also indicate that you will be describing the search process and results in your paper.

Following your introduction, carefully describe your search process and results (use the example above); you should describe a minimum of 5 steps you used to refine your results and be sure to describe what your results were at each step, and how you arrived at your final pool of articles. You may have more than 5 steps and this is fine; if so, describe them. After you’ve discussed the search process, describe the number of articles in your final pool and summarize the types of evidence and studies presented in your final pool. Use your text to help you with this.

Next, identify the one primary research article that you believe best answers your research question, and in a paragraph, discuss why you selected this article. Correctly cite the article within text using 6th ed. APA format, concisely describe the type of research that was conducted in the article, the study design, instrument(s) unsed, sample, findings, data analysis, implications, etc (see rubric), as they relate to your research question. Also, discuss how you determined that the article was peer-reviewed, according to EMU’s criteria for peer-review (note that this is NOT according to the database’s criteria – see the information provided in the Resource module for this course).

Provide your own conclusion for your paper with a brief paragraph (a few sentences) of how you felt about this search process, and what you learned about searching the literature by utilizing a database to locate evidence. (Note that this is not the conclusion from the article itself.)

Remember that this paper is to be written in APA format. This means a cover page with running head, page #’s on all pages, in-text citations in APA format, properly formatted reference page, etc. The body of your paper should not exceed 3-4 pages in length, excluding the title and reference page. Also, remember to use your OWN words; it’s fine to paraphrase information from your text and the primary research article that you select, and cite them, but do not use quotes. Review the grading rubric for this paper in your syllabus(APPENDIX C) or below on this Canvas page) before you submit your final paper.

Last but not least, if you have tried to run your search and are having difficulty, feel free to contact me well before the paper is due, so that I can help you. Additionally, the EMU librarians are available every day to help you if you need assistance conducting your search.