Scientific Research In Nursing Studies

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Scientific nursing literature is extensive (230 journals with impact factors indexed on the Web of Science). All scientific disciplines, including nursing research, should be based on scientific evidence to provide the best patient care (Cochrane, 1972; Ingersoll, 2000). It is important to continually monitor and improve quality of studies in health research. However, nursing research is often less valorized, especially in term of publication quality than others scientific disciplines such as medical or dentistry sciences (Adie et al., 2013; Karri, 2006; Lee et al., 2013, Lempesi et al., 2014). No study has provided a global overview of the quality of pediatric Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) in nursing research. Medical studies related …show more content…

The methodological quality of articles in nursing journals has never been compared to those of another discipline. However, it is necessary to position nursing validity in health scientific discipline.
RCTs provide a high level of scientific evidences, allowing valid conclusions concerning cause and effect (Sibbald and Roland, 1998). Indeed, RCTs are the basis for the adoption of new techniques or treatments, irrespective of the field. One measure of the quality of an RCT, whatever the discipline, is its adhesion to the CONsolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (ConSORT) statement (Altman et al., 2001; Moher et al., 1995).
The purpose of the present study was to compare the methodological quality of pediatric RCTs published in nursing journals to those published in medical journals, based on the ConSORT statement. This study also aimed at identifying whether the reporting of ConSORT items was associated with type of journal, adherence of the journal to the ConSORT statement, or studies sample size.
Materials and …show more content…

This period had been chosen to focus on recently published papers.
2) Medical articles were extracted from PubMed using the same search terms and filters, but without the filter “nursing journal”. Medical sciences have been chosen as comparator due to the fact that medical sciences are considered as science with good methodological quality (Reed, 2016).
3) We randomly selected 200 papers from nursing journals and 200 from medical journals.
4) We included all articles of randomized controlled trials with pediatric population without restriction of disease. We excluded articles which did not meet the inclusion criteria following analysis of the title and abstract. Studies reporting parental intervention (ex : Bigelow et al., 2012; Franck et al., 2012; Jiang et al., 2014), protocols, editorial articles, and papers reporting only the results of a study (with context and methods of the study reported elsewhere) were excluded.

>>Figure 1 : Flow chart. nMed: number of medical articles, nInf: number of nursing

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