Searching the literature and selecting the right references.
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The ability to locate published data on a topic is a fundamental skill in the research process, and it aids in formulating and refining a research question and planning the study. Searching the literature for published studies on a topic relevant to one's question requires knowledge of databases such as MEDLINE, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health, or Hospital Literature Index. PubMed provides access to MEDLINE and over 12 million citations in the medical literature. When searching in PubMed you can apply various "limits," such as what fields the search term is in (eg, author, title, text word, journal), type of report (eg, clinical trial, review, editorial), language, patient age, gender, and human or animal study. The "Boolean operators" (AND, OR, and NOT) can further focus and refine your search. However, to be sure that you retrieve all the files of interest and don't miss any files that might be critical to your understanding of the topic, you must search all fields and be careful not to exclude potentially important files with the NOT operator. (+info)
The top 10 reasons why manuscripts are not accepted for publication.
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This article discusses why many research projects that have been presented in abstract form are never published as full articles, and lists 10 reasons why manuscripts are not accepted for publication in Respiratory Care. Some of these reasons are easily avoidable or readily overcome. Included in this category is submission of manuscripts that do not correspond to the kinds of articles the Journal publishes, either in subject matter or in format. Poor writing impedes peer review and is unlikely to prejudice editors in an author's favor, although it is seldom the primary reason for rejection. Common deficiencies in the methods, results, and discussion sections prevent initial acceptance for publication but are at least potentially amenable to correction. More serious are fundamental defects in study design, which although correctable at the inception of a project, often doom the paper once the study has been completed. Two problems that are especially unfortunate for authors and potential readers alike are failing to revise and resubmit a manuscript after initial peer review and never preparing a full manuscript in the first place, after presentation of the work in abstract form. This special issue of Respiratory Care and other cited publications offer practical resources for authors to use in overcoming each of these problems. (+info)
Making a structured psychiatric diagnostic interview faithful to the nomenclature.
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Psychiatric diagnostic interviews to be used in epidemiologic studies by lay interviewers have, since the 1970s, attempted to operationalize existing psychiatric nomenclatures. How to maximize the chances that they do so successfully has not previously been spelled out. In this article, the authors discuss strategies for each of the seven steps involved in writing, updating, or modifying a diagnostic interview and its supporting materials: 1) writing questions that match the nomenclature's criteria, 2) checking that respondents will be willing and able to answer the questions, 3) choosing a format acceptable to interviewers that maximizes accurate answering and recording of answers, 4) constructing a data entry and cleaning program that highlights errors to be corrected, 5) creating a diagnostic scoring program that matches the nomenclature's algorithms, 6) developing an interviewer training program that maximizes reliability, and 7) computerizing the interview. For each step, the authors discuss how to identify errors, correct them, and validate the revisions. Although operationalization will never be perfect because of ambiguities in the nomenclature, specifying methods for minimizing divergence from the nomenclature is timely as users modify existing interviews and look forward to updating interviews based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, and the International Classification of Diseases, Eleventh Revision. (+info)
A linguistic framework for assessing the quality of written patient information: its use in assessing methotrexate information for rheumatoid arthritis.
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Patient information leaflets are an important adjunct to verbal exchange between doctor and patient. Their value is dependent upon whether they contain useful information from the viewpoint of the patient and are easily understood. We developed a framework based upon linguistic theory for assessing the quality of written patient information and applied it to a set of leaflets about methotrexate treatment. Items included the overall structure of the text, the technicality of the vocabulary used, the number of content words per clause ('lexical density'), and the clarity of the role relationship between author and reader. The leaflets consisted of up to nine identifiable sections (range 3-8): background information about the drug, summary of its use, dosage instructions, outline of benefits and side-effects, monitoring information, constraints on patient behavior, storage instructions, and clinical contact availability. Most leaflets contained a high number of content words per clause and the identity of the author was clear in only three (17%). Linguistic analysis provides highly relevant information about written patient information. Together with critical assessment of factual and visual aspects, consideration of key linguistic features should improve the quality of informational texts for our patients. (+info)
The emperor's new shibboleth.
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If an idea or result can't be conveyed in plain language, how important can it really be? (+info)
Citation patterns in tropical medicine journals.
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Selections of most important journals in the field of tropical medicine have previously been identified with the help of resources such as bibliographical and citation databases. This article uses ISI's Journal Citation Reports (JSR) for 2002 to analyse the citation characteristics of the Tropical Medicine category. According to these data, this small but diverse group of 12 journals bestows some 40% more citations than it receives. Its six typical core journals tend to cite one another heavily, but they also refer a lot to multidisciplinary science and general medicine journals, and to infectious diseases and parasitology journals. Looking at the sources from which JCR's tropical medicine journals derive their citations, it is clear that in this reverse direction, the specialty's literature is still more concentrated. Apart from the typical core, this JCR category also contains a number of journals with more idiosyncratic citing patterns, focused on specialties such as paediatrics, a single disease (leprosy) and a representative of Latin American and Francophone biomedical science each. Implications of concentrated citedness and language biases are discussed briefly. This paper features a selection of bibliometric parameters relating to the tropical medicine journals and lists of the 80 journals most citing and cited by them. (+info)
The effects of very early Alzheimer's disease on the characteristics of writing by a renowned author.
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Iris Murdoch (I.M.) was among the most celebrated British writers of the post-war era. Her final novel, however, received a less than enthusiastic critical response on its publication in 1995. Not long afterwards, I.M. began to show signs of insidious cognitive decline, and received a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, which was confirmed histologically after her death in 1999. Anecdotal evidence, as well as the natural history of the condition, would suggest that the changes of Alzheimer's disease were already established in I.M. while she was writing her final work. The end product was unlikely, however, to have been influenced by the compensatory use of dictionaries or thesauri, let alone by later editorial interference. These facts present a unique opportunity to examine the effects of the early stages of Alzheimer's disease on spontaneous written output from an individual with exceptional expertise in this area. Techniques of automated textual analysis were used to obtain detailed comparisons among three of her novels: her first published work, a work written during the prime of her creative life and the final novel. Whilst there were few disparities at the levels of overall structure and syntax, measures of lexical diversity and the lexical characteristics of these three texts varied markedly and in a consistent fashion. This unique set of findings is discussed in the context of the debate as to whether syntax and semantics decline separately or in parallel in patients with Alzheimer's disease. (+info)
Participation of African social scientists in malaria control: identifying enabling and constraining factors.
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OBJECTIVE: To examine the enabling and constraining factors that influence African social scientists involvement in malaria control. METHODS: Convenience and snowball sampling was used to identify participants. Data collection was conducted in two phases: a mailed survey was followed by in-depth phone interviews with selected individuals chosen from the survey. FINDINGS: Most participants did not necessarily seek malaria as a career path. Having a mentor who provided research and training opportunities, and developing strong technical skills in malaria control and grant or proposal writing facilitated career opportunities in malaria. A paucity of jobs and funding and inadequate technical skills in malaria limited the type and number of opportunities available to social scientists in malaria control. CONCLUSION: Understanding the factors that influence job satisfaction, recruitment and retention in malaria control is necessary for better integration of social scientists into malaria control. However, given the wide array of skills that social scientists have and the variety of deadly diseases competing for attention in Sub Saharan Africa, it might be more cost effective to employ social scientists to work broadly on issues common to communicable diseases in general rather than solely on malaria. (+info)