Athletic Training

Welcome! This guide is designed to help you learn how to use K-State Libraries' many resources to complete your athletic training assignments.

Library Research Guide

Definitions of Terminology

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.