Dietetics

The following terms can help with your understanding of the evidence-based practice (EBP) process and help as you conduct research for your classes: 

Research Foundations:

• Abstracts
  • are short summaries that are included at the beginning of scholarly articles.
  • help you quickly see the subject of the article.
• Citations 
  • provide the publication information (such as author, title, page numbers, etc.).
  • allows you to find a particular resource
• 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. 
• 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. 

Research Methods & Study Design 

• 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.
• 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.

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.