In EBP Search Assignment Part B, each team member was required to find research articles to contribute to their team's pool of potential evidence.
Now, as a team, you will need to examine the overall pool of evidence, and identify 8 "keeper" studies to include as supporting evidence for your EBP team project.
Here are some tips and guidance to assist your team in the decision-making process to identify "keeper" studies:
- Start with the most recent articles and work your way down.
- Evidence-based practice includes incorporating the current, best available evidence. It may help to sort all of your team's articles by most recent date and work your way down the list.
- Keep in mind, however, there are no publication date limits for the articles you include! Sometimes the best evidence is from 5 years ago for certain topics, while other times the best available evidence is from 10 years ago. It depends on the PICOT question. Most commonly, studies you identify will be from a variety of date ranges. You might keep one article from 2015, another from 2023, and another from 2010.
- Include articles that are relevant to your PICOT.
- Examine articles carefully to ensure they are relevant to the population, intervention, and outcomes of your PICOT.
- Prioritize those that are directly relevant, over ones that are peripherally relevant.
- Ensure that articles you select are actually research studies.
- Sometimes, it can be hard to determine whether an article is a research study based on the title and abstract alone. To verify, examine the full-text.
- Look for articles that have a study purpose/aim/objective; a listed study design/methodology; methods; results; discussion; and conclusion.
- If you are unsure, please contact your Nursing Librarian Jodi Jameson for assistance (jodi.jameson@utoledo.edu).
- Avoid articles that are not research studies.
- These include articles that are general literature reviews (as opposed to systematic reviews which are excellent to include!).
- These also include general overviews, discussion articles, commentaries, editorials, opinion letters, etc.
- Also avoid articles that are described as protocols, including protocols for randomized trials, protocols for systematic reviews, etc. Protocols describe how the authors plan to conduct the study - but the study hasn't actually been conducted yet!
- Again, when in doubt, ask Jodi Jameson for help.
- Access, download, and save the full-text.
- Once you have identified your keeper studies, access and download the full-text.
- Complete instructions on accessing full-text articles can be found here.
- For articles that the library does not have access to, you can submit an interlibrary loan request.
