Assessing Research Flashcards
Once you have found a relevant research article what do you need to consider?
- Quality of journal
- Quality of Article/research
- Author credibility
- How the study was funded
Where can you find an authors ranking?
H index, research gate or scopus.
What is an impact factor? and where can you find it?
where the journal is ranked in its field on a particular year. Thomson Reuters incites Journal citation reports, journal website or SJR
How can you assess internal validity?
- Bias
- Randomisation
- Blinding
- Sample size
- P values (probability of the hypothesis being true)
- confidence intervals
Define Bias? and provide an example?
A type of error in the study related to ways the target or study populations differ, threatens the validity. It can distort the results and conclusions from the truth, and result in poor quality by over or under estimating the results.
- selection: the selection of people is not representative of the population under study
- Attrition: loss to follow up
- Ascertainment:When false results are produced by non-random sampling and conclusions made about an entire group are based on a distorted or non-typical sample. The researcher knows which group participants are in. overcome by randomisation and blinding.
- Measurement: In accurate measurement when collecting the data. Need to ensure data is collected in the same way by all.
- Misclassification: A type of measurement bias, when people are misclassified according to an exposure or outcome, example: some one who is a heavy smoker is classified as a light smoker ( can occur through researcher error or un-truthful participant).
What are confounding factors or variables?
A distorting factor in a study that can impact on the results by creating a false positive or negative
Example: link between coffee & lung cancer. would need to consider other causes of lung cancer such as smoking and select non-smoking participants.
