Research Papers: Shades of Gray

For most students including nurse practitioner students, writing an original research paper is part of scholastic requirements at some point in the program. Hopefully, students will have a concise rubric to follow which will ensure that the content of the paper addresses the requirements.

Armed with the 6th version of the APA Publication Manual in hand, the nurse practitioner student sets out to research a topic of interest. (Since many NP programs require APA format for writing, a wonderful resource for APA tips is the Purdue Online Writing Lab. The actual book is still generally necessary but this website makes finding the correct formatting very simple).

To perform research for a paper, the search methods  must be more in-depth and specialized than using your favorite Web search engine. Google Scholar may help identify some articles but for efficient searching that will return relevant articles, databases such as Medline/PubMed and CINAHL must be used. Otherwise, thousands of results may be returned and it is not efficient use of one’s time reading all of these abstracts to see if the article is relevant. Boolean  search methods must be used to focus the search. While that may sound overwhelming, it is simply using terms such as “and” “or” & “not” in the search. “Or” will broaden the search, “and” will narrow the search and “not” will exclude anything following the term.

Today however, I’d like to focus on the grey literature. Grey literature may include articles that were never formally published in a peer-review journal, articles that are not purely clinical research, articles that are not indexed by the major databases, and articles that are ahead of print or located on institutional websites. Grey literature may also contain valuable background information for the research paper. Below are some grey literature databases to use for locating additional articles:

• Graynet/OpenSigle – a collection of web-based European gray literature resources
• Mednar – is a free deep-web medical search engine that will return results in real-time
• The New York Academy of Medicine – a free grey literature database
• Scirus – contains over 440 million scientific indexed items

Searching for articles needs to be done well in advance of writing the paper to allow for sufficient time to retrieve an article if it is not available in PDF or full-text downloading. Utilize your institutions librarians as an additional resource. My experience with librarians has always been extremely positive and they are generally most willing to help. These search strategies can later be employed when in clinical practice to find the best data for an identified issue for evidence based practice.