Week 5: Article Review

For the fifth week of my senior project, my progress was more limited than usual since I was out of town for college visits. Although I was not able to dedicate as much time to the active research, I did take steps to keep my project organized and moving forward. At this point, my pool of studies is more or less finalized, and I have sorted all originally included articles into a single document. Alongside each study, I noted my rationale for why it was included or excluded. Keeping this level of documentation is important for transparency and ensures that my methodology could be replicated by someone else following the same process.

As I finish full-text readings of these studies, I believe that I may still exclude a few that, upon deeper review, do not fully align with my research question. During this stage, I have also encountered an unexpected challenge. While attempting to access several full articles, I found that a few were blocked behind subscription paywalls, which I expected. I checked for access through the public library system, but unfortunately, these articles were not available there either, which surprised me. This has introduced an additional task for me, which is to search for other methods of accessing these studies, such as even contacting the author themselves. If I am ultimately unable to obtain certain articles, this may become a limitation of my project that I will need to acknowledge in my final paper. 

This weekend, I hope to finish constructing my data extraction table. I will design it to include all relevant variables from the studies (intervention type for example) and incorporate the necessary formulas that will allow me to record and then compare data across articles. Setting up this table will prepare me to begin the complex data extraction process more easily.