Nursing: Nursing research

Therapy or Intervention: how do we fix or treat the problem? 

Diagnosis or Screening: How do we find what the problem is? 

Prognosis: How will the patient/s live with the problem? 

Aetiology or Causation: what caused the problem? 

Prevention: How to we stop the problem from happening (again)?

Randomised Controlled Trials (RCT): a type of trial designed to reduce the impact of bias for both participants and experimenters. The gold standard in research. eg. researchers half these people a real medication and half a sugar pill but didn’t tell them who got what so ensure that the results truly were random. 

Cohort Studies: a study where individuals who share characteristics are studied over a long period of time, often years or decades. eg. the researchers followed people with a certain heart condition over years and recorded information about them throughout their lives. 

Case-Controlled Studies: a study that compares a group with a certain characteristic to one without it. eg.  researchers compared the outcomes from a group of smokers to a group of nonsmokers]

Cross Sectional Studies: a study that looks at data about the population at a specific point in time. eg. how many people in the hospital currently have an infection?

Case Reports or Case Studies: an in-depth study on a particular case. eg. researchers looked at the situation of these three people in the entirety of history that have had this genetic mutation. 

Once we have our concept, we can start to fill out the PICO. This will guide us in our search process. 

P: Stress
I: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
C: No intervention 
O: Unknown [this is what we are trying to learn!] 
 

The PICO informs the keywords, which are what we will use to build our research. We can immediately discount out C and O, because these are “no intervention” and “unknown” – we don’t need to search for these. 

This leaves us with stress and cognitive behavioural therapy as our two keywords, or key concepts if you prefer.

Something to note about keywords; not all of them are a single word. Some, like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, are actually a key phrase, made up of more than one word. When we have a key phrase, we need to make sure we note this by enclosing all the words in that phrase in quotation marks!
 

Keywords: Stress, "Cognitive Behavioural Therapy" 

We all speak and read research in English, but that doesn't mean we're all using the same language. Different people will use different words to mean the same thing, so it's important when we are researching that we consider alternate keywords so that we don’t miss out on finding great resources. 

When you are considering other keywords, you might want to use, think not just about synonyms, but also about different spelling (such as American vs Australian English) and also plural forms.
 

We now have our lists of keywords, but what are we using these for??? We’re going to search the database for them.  
We’re going to put all of these into our database at once to basically ask the database to give us resources that contain at least one of these words, but not necessarily all of them. 
To do this, we need to first put them together in a concept bucket or pile so we can search for all of them together. We can do think of this like drawing a circle around all our synonyms for the same keyword – but obviously we can’t draw a circle in a database, so instead, we will use brackets.

To make the database understand that we only want one of these words, we can put the operator “OR” between each keyword. 

(“Cognitive Behavioural Therapy” OR “Cognitive Therapy” OR “Cognition Therapy” OR “Behaviour Therapy” OR “Cognitive Psychotherapy” OR CBT OR “Mindfulness-based Therapy”)

We can do the same thing with our second keyword and its synonyms. 

So, we have our two keyword/concepts, but how might we put them together so that the database returns articles that contain both something from the first concept (cognitive behavioural therapy) AND the second concept (stress)?
We’ll use the word AND!

To do this, we simply write out our first set of keywords, enclose them with a set of brackets, write the operator "AND", and follow up with our second set of keywords. 

(“Cognitive Behavioural Therapy” OR “Cognitive Therapy” OR “Cognition Therapy” OR “Behaviour Therapy” OR “Cognitive Psychotherapy” OR CBT OR “Mindfulness-based Therapy”) AND (Stress OR Distress OR Anxiety OR Burnout OR Fatigue OR “Work Stress” OR “Job Stress” OR “Home Stress”)
 

This search string is now ready to be copied and pasted into a database such as CINAHL+ (available via the Library eResources page). 

Primary evidence includes original research and studies, with a low level of evidence synthesis. When written up, these contain mostly reporting on what occurred/what the outcome was, rather than attempts to understand or explain why, or to generalise the results onto the whole population. eg. trials, studies, case studies, and case reports.