Chapter 6 Flashcards
Literature review
A written summary of the state of evidence on a research problem. It is useful for consumers of nursing research to acquire skills for reading, appraising, and preparing written evidence summaries.
Purpose of literature reviews
To summarize evidence on a topic- to sum up what is known and what is not known
If you are preparing a literature review, you should rely mostly on what?
Primary sources
Primary sources
Descriptions of studies written by researchers who conducted them
Secondary sources
Descriptions of studies prepared by someone else
Literature reviews are what kind of source?
Secondary
3 approaches for developing a search strategy
Bibliographic databases
Ancestry approach (footnote chasing)
Descendancy approach
Bibliographic databases
Accessed by computer
Keyword
A word or phrase that captures key concepts in your review question
For quantitative studies, the keywords are usually…
Independent or dependent variables and perhaps the population
For qualitative studies, the keywords are…
The central phenomenon and the population
3 widely used Boolean operators
AND, OR, NOT (in all caps)
Truncation symbols
*
One way to force a text word search is…
Use “ “ around a phrase to retrieve citations in which the exact phrase appears in the text fields.
CINAHL
Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature
MEDLINE
Medical Literature On-Line
What is CINAHL database?
An important electronic database for nurses. It provides info for locating references and abstracts for most citations.
CINAHL source indicates…
Name of the journal
Year of publication
Volume
Issue
Page numbers
What is the MEDLINE database?
Developed by US National Library of a medicine. Premier source for bibliographic coverage of the biomedical literature. Can be accessed for free on the Internet at the PubMed website.
PubMed website
A lifelong resource, regardless of your institutions access to bibliographic databases
MEDLINE uses a controlled vocabulary called… and for what?
MeSH (Medical Subject Headings)
To code and index articles
Google Scholar
Hey bibliographic search engine that was launched in 2004. Accessible for free on the Internet
It is risky to depend on…
Google Scholar
Substantive themes
What is the pattern of evidence?
Methodologies themes
What methods have been used to address the question?
Generalizability/transferability themes
To what population does the evidence apply?
What theme is usually the greatest interest?
Substantive
Major steps in preparing a written research review include…
Formulating a question
Devising a search strategy
Searching and retrieving relevant sources
Abstracting and encoding information
Apprasing studies
Analyzing and integrating the information
Preparing a written synthesis
Literature reviews should rely mostly on what source material?
Primary
Strategies for finding studies on a topic include…
Bibliographic databases, and ancestry approach and the descendancy approach
The analysis of information from a literature search essentially involves…
The identification of important themes- regularities and patterns and the information
The reviewers role is to point out…
What has been studied
How adequate and dependable the studies are
What gaps exist in the body of research
The four levels of measurement
Nominal
Ordinal
Interval
Ratio
Descriptive statistics are used to…
Summarize and describe quantitative data
Symmetric skewed
One tail longer than the other or one peak
Normal distribution
Bell-shaped curve
