CONDUCTING A LITERATURE REVIEW
Respond to two of your colleagues with a comment that asks for clarification, provides support for, or contributes additional information.
Discussion 2: Conducting a Literature Review
The concepts of patient safety, medication errors, and quality care are important considerations when providing quality care. The benefits of these practice concepts inspired the decision to seek evidence-based theoretical insights from the different online databases. The subject literature research provided additional information on which clinical knowledge would be expanded. In the recently conducted secondary research on patient safety and the quality of care, the study relied upon published sources from two online databases, EBSCO Host and Medline. The two databases were considered because they contain authoritative, peer-reviewed, updated, and complete medical journals and articles. Indeed, these online databases were crucial to the clinical research since we found at least 963 relevant articles and journals. I applied specific search terms, such as medication error, patient safety, patient outcomes, and quality of care. Initially, there were tens of thousands of articles and journals related to these topics, but I narrowed the search to sources published in the last five years. The publication is often considered in nursing research to ensure only up-to-date evidence is applied when making clinical decisions. New research findings could challenge existing theories, justify recent trends in healthcare and allow the study to capitalize on discoveries to expand practice knowledge. Other considerations influencing the overall number of relevant journal articles include the research context, the type of study conducted, and relevance to the keywords.
Information overload and misinformation were the primary challenges when doing my research. During my research, I often needed help with the problem of information overload, such that it takes pretty long to filter multiple sources and settle for a narrower set of articles and journals. Such challenges make it quite hard to harness web-based information while equally wasting time before the researcher can settle for a specific number of reliable sources (Roetzel, 2019). Fortunately, I overcame this problem by narrowing the number of retrieved sources. The number of published sources can be limited through relevance and currency. Lastly, misinformation was a considerable challenge during my research because most web sources did not contain accurate data. Such resources would compromise the quality of research by providing inaccurate information. Therefore, researchers can overcome such challenges by relying on verifiable, authoritative, complete, peer-reviewed journals and articles.
Nurse research consultants could significantly assist me in identifying, analyzing, narrowing down, and applying evidence from published resources. Nurse consultants are trained and registered nurses with advanced knowledge and skills in various fields of nursing. The nursing consultant would be the ideal supervisor to consider at work due to the specialist’s professional experience and expertise in consultant services. Indeed, working closely with the clinical nurse research consultant would be an added advantage in my research process since this specialist can help me identify research and knowledge gaps and assist in retrieving valuable sources of clinical data. Overall, the decision to seek help from the consultant would be informed by the specialist’s sufficient background in research and the clinician’s overall knowledge of nursing concepts.
References
Roetzel, P. G. (2019). Information overload in the information age: a review of the literature from business administration, business psychology, and related disciplines with a bibliometric approach and framework development. Business Research, 12(2), 479-522. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40685-018-0069-z