Understanding Levels of Evidence
As you review the articles you have collected, a valuable resource is the Evidence Based Research pyramid to help you place that article into the different levels of evidence.
The strength of evidence INCREASES as it moves up the pyramid. For example, Systematic Reviews provide a higher quality of evidence than a Cohort Study.
CFCF [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)] Retireved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Research_design_and_evidence.svg
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Evidence-Based Practice for Nursing: Evaluating the EvidenceThis guide by East Carolina University Libraries provides more details on the levels of evidence and how to evaluate data.
Review Results for Retractions
While many databases will either remove or label retracted articles, that may not always be the case so these steps can help you identify retracted articles in your results.
- After you have reviewed and applied inclusion/exclusion criteria to your results, you should have a set of articles as your potential evidence.
- Perform a search in the Retraction Watch database for the titles of the articles to determine if, and why, the article was retracted. (See example below.)
- Based on the information provided about the retraction reason, you can determine how to use that information in your research.
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Retraction Watch NewsThis blog/newsletter can help you stay up to date on retractions in scholarship.
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Retraction Watch User GuideA document by Retraction Watch to help you get started, and to answer some questions that are likely to come up.
Evidence Based Practice as a Topic
Review your program documents for specific instructions on how you should be critically appraising individual articles. The links below provide some over-arching theory and examples of reviewing types of evidence.
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ARTICLE: How to read a paper: Papers that summarise other papersThis is an article on the BMJ web site about how to read papers that summarize other papers such as systematic reviews and meta-analyses. In order to access the paper, you must complete a FREE registration.
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EBOOK: Evidence Based PracticeAn open access eBook created by the University of Minnesota on all aspects of evidence-based practice (EBP). Great practice tool for formulating PICO questions.