Week 3: Abstract Review

For the third week of my senior project, I began a deeper level of screening by beginning to read the abstracts of the studies I gathered from PubMed. As I read through the abstracts, I started creating tags to help organize the studies based on key characteristics. These tags included the type of intervention used (such as teach-back or written instructions), the patient population, and the specific hospital department or treatment context. Creating this tagging system has been helpful in identifying patterns across studies and will likely make data extraction and comparison easier later on as I can group studies accordingly. At the same time, I removed studies that I felt were not in the scope of my project.

In addition to screening PubMed results, I expanded my search to other databases. I used Google Scholar with the same search query I made earlier. Since Google Scholar offers fewer filtering options, I limited my review to the top 50 results sorted by relevance, which still provided a broad range of potentially useful studies. Based on this experience, I decided not to continue searching CINAHL due to subscription barriers, especially since Google Scholar already casts a broad net. Similarly, I am working to finish reviewing studies from JAMA and incorporating any relevant ones into my master document. However, I believe more will be added as I sift through the studies more deeply which may point to more relevant studies that I can use.

I will admit that I was not very productive this week, and I do feel slightly behind my original schedule. However, I have a clear plan moving forward. My goal is to complete a more thorough abstract review of any added documents to further narrow down my sources as well. If I have time, I hope to additionally do another search on PubMed with more specific search queries to address any issues that could arise from using a longer one, as Mr. Ahmad suggested. Looking ahead to next week, I plan to begin full-text readings of selected studies in order to start preparing my Introduction, Literature Review, and Methods sections for submission by the March 27th due date.