Practice-based Research in (allied) healthcare

1 Research competence for a professional context

First of all, you must think of relevant keywords to search for. The main keywords should already be included in your research question. You can then further expand these terms or make themmore specific. You can also come up with synonyms and alternate spellings for many of these terms. Next, you must combine these keywords in the right manner (you can use Boolean operators for this: AND, OR and NOT) and you can make your search strategy more efficient (e.g. with truncation and masking). Furthermore, you can make a preliminary selection based on such criteria as publication date, language or research design. Remember that being too restrictive during this early phase may cause you to miss relevant articles. More in-depth information about and examples of searching for literature can be found in Chapters 4 and 10. In those chapters, we discuss the process of drawing up a good search strategy as an aspect of preparing for the execution of practice-based research. Step 3: Evaluating the relevance, quality and applicability of the evidence you found When you have found search results based on the question you formulated, it is important to screen and select all possibly relevant articles. Initially, you do so based on the title of an article and its abstract (summary). If you cannot eliminate or select an article on those grounds, you look at the entire article instead. You do so with the help of (pre)defined inclusion criteria . Making a selection based on the contents and properties of the literature It is important to consider to what extent an article answers your question. Since the articles you find can be more or less specific in nature than the question you have come up with, you must consider carefully to what extent every element of your research question applies to the research described in the article (e.g. research population, the intervention(s), the outcomes and the time frame). After all, this largely determines the usefulness of a given article. Examples of criteria that you can use to select or reject articles (insofar as they were not already excluded by your search strategy itself ) are whether an article is sufficiently recent (the time period depends on the topic at hand) and – very practical – whether it is written in a language you can understand and whether you can gain access to the article. Furthermore, you can select based on the type of research (research design) as an indication of the strength of the evidence. Optionally, you can supplement your selection criteria with a number of important methodological aspects that are relevant for your research question. Whether you choose to eliminate studies with a lower body of evidence from the outset or decide to include them – and therefore not select on this criterion – and take the strength of the evidence into account when drawing your conclusions 1.5.3

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