- Pick ONE broad topic within healthcare (examples: cancer, Medicare, anxiety, pregnancy, health information technology, nutrition, physical therapy, etc.).
- Find ONE peer-reviewed article in EACH of the above three article types about your topic (so three articles total- one study article, one literature review article, one meta analysis article).
- For each article, describe the following:
- Purpose of the article
- Format of the article (i.e. length, subheadings, etc.)
- What did you learn about your topic from this kind of article?
- Finally, address the following:
- Which article seems the most informative about your topic overall?
- Which article was easiest to read? Which was the most difficult?
How will you know which article is which type? Studies usually have specific sections for methodology (i.e. where they explain what they did in detail) and data collection/analysis. Literature review articles usually do not have a methodology or, if they do, their methodology consists only of the guidelines they followed to find the articles they used. Meta analysis articles do have methodology and data analysis sections, but they describe which existing articles they used (kind of like a literature review). An even better indicator: most literature review and meta analysis articles will have the terms "literature (or systematic) review" or "meta-analysis" somewhere in the title or abstract- read carefully!
The three journal articles you select do not have to be exactly on the same precise topic, as long as they fit under the same broad umbrella (for example, if you pick health information technology, you can have one article about EMR, one about CPOE, and one about costs of technology adoption- different threads within the broad topic area of health information technology). Be sure to find all three articles you will use before you start writing so you don’t waste any time if you have to switch topics.
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