Evidence-Based Practice - From a nursing perspective, Melnyk and Fineout-Overholt (2011), define evidence-based practice as "a problem-solving approach to the delivery of health care that integrates best evidence from studies and patient care data with clinician expertise and patient preferences and values."
Guideline - Statements or other indications of policy or procedure for standards of care or practice, based up the best available evidence. Health fields often refer to "clinical practice guidelines." Guidelines are often created by an expert consensus group based on rigorous analysis of existing evidence. (See National Guideline Clearinghouse as a free resource to search for guidelines).
Literature Search - Searching for content on a topic. Tip: Look at assignment instructions to look for specific requirements, such as search for only primary articles.
Meta-analysis - A survey in which the results of all of the included studies are similar enough statistically that the results are combined and analyzed as if they were one study.
MeSH - Medical Subject Headings: a thesaurus of medical terms used by many databases and libraries to index and classify medical information.
Primary Source - A a document or physical object which was written or created during the time under study. These sources were present during an experience or time period and offer an inside view of a particular event. In nursing literature a type of primary source is a journal article about new research findings.
Qualitative - Refers to any research based on something that is impossible to accurately and precisely measure.
Quantitative - Also called "empirical research," refers to any research based on something that can be accurately and precisely measured. Tip: An excellent clue that a scholarly journal article contains empirical research is the presence of some sort of statistical analysis
Secondary Source - A secondary source, such as a systematic review, interprets and synthesizes primary sources. A systematic review can be a journal article within an article nursing database such as CINAHL Complete or PubMed.
Systematic Review - A comprehensive survey of a topic in which all of the primary studies of the highest level of evidence have been systematically identified, appraised and then summarized according to an explicit and reproducible methodology.