The following terms can help with your understanding of the evidence-based practice (EBP) process and help as you conduct research for your classes:
- Citations
- provide the publication information (such as author, title, page numbers, etc.).
- allows you to find a particular resource.
- Abstracts
- are short summaries that are included at the beginning of scholarly articles.
- help you quickly see the subject of the article.
- Databases
- are organized collections of information.
- are online and contain many types of information (newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, etc.).
- contain citations for the articles found within it and may contain full-text documents.
- Empirical research
- is original research conducted by the authors through observation and experimentation.
- present the findings of this type of research/study with these sections: abstract, introduction (may include a literature review), methods, results/conclusions, discussion, and references.
(For our purposes, literature reviews are not considered empirical research.)
- Evidence-based articles
- contain a level of evidence (discussed on another page).
- are based on empirical (original) research.
- Literature reviews
- analyze existing literature/articles for a particular topic.
- can be the whole article or may appear at the beginning of an article to provide the rationale for the research.
- have conclusions based on the point-of-view and background of the author(s).
- may not have statistical analyses conducted from the different articles.
- are not acceptable types of evidence-based articles for your Athletic Training classes.
- Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)
- used in PubMed, ProQuest Nursing and Allied Health Premium (if you know the heading).
- list preferred terms to describe health-related concepts.
- arranged in an hierarchical format.
- Peer review
- other scholars in the same research area review and critique an article or other resource.
- is explained further in the infographic to the left.
- Types of studies:
- Meta-Analysis: Method where results of similar studies are evaluated systematically and analyzed statistically to identify a stronger result than from an individual study.
- Randomized Control Trial: Study where subjects were randomly assigned to an experimental or control group to minimize bias in the results.
- Systematic Review: Method of gathering original studies of the highest level of evidence and appraising and summarizing them. The method of gathering them must be explicitly detailed in order to be reproducible.