National Center for complementary & Alternative Medicine
his guide provides resources that point to new directions in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) research. The field has advanced significantly since the founding of the Office of Alternative Medicine at the NIH in 1992. Over the years, researchers have identified the strengths and weaknesses of existing methodologies, and are now exploring new initiatives to advance CAM's clinical evidence base.
Google Scholar Citations provide a simple way for authors to keep track of citations to their articles. You can check who is citing your publications, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics. You can also make your profile public, so that it may appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name, e.g., richard feynman.
Best of all, it's quick to set up and simple to maintain - even if you have written hundreds of articles, and even if your name is shared by several different scholars. You can add groups of related articles, not just one article at a time; and your citation metrics are computed and updated automatically as Google Scholar finds new citations to your work on the web. You can choose to have your list of articles updated automatically or review the updates yourself, or to manually update your articles at any time.
Clinical research is the “proof of principle” that a basic discovery has the potential to advance medicine and improve health. Clinical research scientists are the translators. Their role is to recognize the clinical relevance of basic discoveries and design the optimal means for determining if the discovery leads to improved health. Optimal translation demands the thoughtful, statistically sound analysis of data derived from a meticulously designed and conducted clinical research study. http://med.stanford.edu/cr/overview.html
EBP checklists
These checklists are designed to help you ask the appropriate questions of different types of research designs. They are adapted from a number of sources including the JAMA series on "How to read the Medical Literature", the UK Workshops on Teaching Evidence-based Health Care and the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP), Oxford.
Journal Articles
Systematic Review: a high-level overview of primary research on a particular research question that tries to identify, select, synthesize and appraise all high quality research evidence relevant to that question in order to answer it. – Definition from Cochrane Collaboration http://www.cochrane.org/about-us/evidence-based-health-care
|
Month |
Activity |
|
1-2 |
Preparation of protocol |
|
3-8 |
Searches for published and unpublished studies |
|
2-3 |
Pilot test of eligibility criteria |
|
3-8 |
Inclusion assessments |
|
3 |
Pilot test of Risk of Bias assessment |
|
3-10 |
Validity assessments |
|
3 |
Pilot test of data collection |
|
3-10 |
Data collection |
|
3-10 |
Data entry |
|
5-11 |
Follow-up of missing information |
|
8-10 |
Analysis |
|
1-11 |
Preparation of review report |
|
12- |
Keeping the review up-to-date |
|
Source: |
Higgins JPT, Green S (editors). Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions Version 5.1.0 [updated March 2011]. The Cochrane Collaboration, 2011. Available from www.cochrane-handbook.org. Courtesy of the University of Maryland HS/HSL |
If you are considering a systematic review project, we suggest you consult the following documents; they provide the framework for conducting systematic reviews.
Additionally, researchers should use the PRISMA statement (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) when writing the reivew. The PRISMA statement consists of a 27-item checklist and a four phase flow diagram. PRISMA is an evidence-based minimum set of items for reporting in systematic reviews and meta-analyses.
Primary sources (archives)
Grey literature (GL) is defined as:
"Materials not published commercially or indexed by major databases.
"Ephemeral," "invisible" literature that may be unpublished, unevaluated, not peer-reviewed
"Information produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in electronic and print formats not controlled by commercial publishing i.e. where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body." (Luxembourg, 1997 - Expanded in New York, 2004) (http://www.greynet.org/
