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Nursing Research & Evidence-Based Practice Fellows Toolkit

Research Toolbox: Pearl Growing

Search Skills Series: Pearl Growing
This brief presentation shows how to grow your literature search from one "seed" article into many articles.

With the following search techniques, you can learn to grow many articles from one.

Look at the article's reference list. Are there any other references you can use?

This mining technique works well with newer articles.

Paste the title of the good article you’ve found into your favorite peer-reviewed article database, like CINAHL or PubMed.

Hit search to pull the article up in the database, then examine the information about the article.

Use "Citing Articles" or "Times Cited" to uncover additional articles. Repeat the process with these newly discovered articles.

For more research tips and tricks, contact us at library@inova.org

Qualitative Research

Qualitative Research seeks to understand and interpret personal experiences, behaviours, interactions, and social contexts to explain the phenomena of interest, such as the attitudes, beliefs, and perspectives of patients and clinicians; the interpersonal nature of caregiver and patient relationships; the illness experience; or the impact of human suffering (Wong et al, 2004).
Wong SSL, Wilczynski NL, Haynes RB. Developing optimal search strategies for detecting clinically relevant qualitative studies in Medline. Medinfo 2004;311-314

 


Qualitative studies are subjective; they gain knowledge through the process of induction, involve use of words, and produce findings that are not meant to be generalizable.

Dearholt, S. & Dang, D. (2012). Individual Research Studies. JOHNS HOPKINS NURSING EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE: MODEL AND GUIDELINES. Retrieved http://www.r2library.com/Resource/Title/1935476769/ch0006s0090

To find articles that are more likely to describe quantitative research, look at the study types, study methods, or data analysis methods.
The following image provides examples of the types of terms you can look for.

The following is an example of the terms you can put in your search to limit to Qualitative Articles:

(Qualitative OR Naturalistic OR Ethnography OR Phenomenology OR  Grounded Theory OR Experience OR Thematic)

Copy and paste the terms above into the search box of your favorite database (maybe CINAHL or PubMed). Connect this term phrase with your search topic with AND.

Example: Healing Touch AND (Qualitative OR Naturalistic OR Ethnography OR Phenomenology OR  Grounded Theory OR Experience OR Thematic)

This system isn’t perfect.  You’ll still need to look at the Methods and Data Analysis/Results sections of the articles you find to make sure you have a truly quantitative study.

Also, check your article closely to see if you found a Mixed Methods study.  These types of study include both quantitative and qualitative methods.

Quantitative Research

Quantitative studies are objective; they test theory (deductive), involve the use of numbers, and produce findings that are meant to be generalizable--applied to other groups.

 

Dearholt, S. & Dang, D. (2012). Individual Research Studies. JOHNS HOPKINS NURSING EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE: MODEL AND GUIDELINES. Retrieved 2017 http://www.r2library.com/Resource/Title/1935476769/ch0006s0090

To find articles that are more likely to describe quantitative research, look at the study types, study methods, or data analysis methods. 
 

The following image provides examples of the types of terms you can look for. 

The following is a sample search phrase you can add to your topic search to find Quantitative Research articles:

(Quantitative OR Positivistic OR Experimental OR Clinical Trial OR Randomized Control Trial OR Validity OR Intervention OR T-test OR ANOVA)
 

Copy and paste the terms above into the search box of your favorite database (maybe CINAHL or PubMed). Connect this term phrase with your search topic with AND.

Example: Caring AND (Quantitative OR Positivistic OR Experimental OR Clinical Trial OR Randomized Control Trial OR Validity OR Intervention OR T-test OR ANOVA OR Confidence Interval)

This system isn’t perfect.  You’ll still need to look at the Methods and Data Analysis/Results sections of the articles you find to make sure you have a truly quantitative study.

In addition, there are many more terms you can use to help refine your search to include mostly quantitative articles. Think of the names of all the different types of statistical tests. Below are just a few:

((Pearson's R) OR Regression OR Mann-Whitey OR (Wilcox signed rank) OR Kruskal-Wallis)


Finally, check your article closely to see if you found a Mixed Methods study.  These types of study include both quantitative and qualitative methods.