How to Stay Up to Date with Healthcare Research as a Nurse

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04 Apr How to Stay Up to Date with Healthcare Research as a Nurse

Posted at 12:53h in Latest News by

Staying up-to-date with research as a nurse is integral to improving patient care, health outcomes, enhancing decision-making, and staying relevant in the field. However, with nurses’ busy schedules, it can be trying to stay up with research, especially at the end of a long day when all you want to do is collapse into bed, right? It can also be difficult to understand particular research jargon and identify reliable sources. Thus, this blog discusses tips for staying current with research and how you can implement what you learn into nursing practice. Let’s dive in!

Strategies for Staying Up-to-Date on Research

It’s important to leverage technology when looking for nursing research. Here are some ideas on how to do that.

Nursing Journals with Email Alerts

Examples of these include:

And many more! Just search “nursing journals with e-mail alerts.”

Research Databases with Specific Filters

There are many research databases with nurse practice articles. You can type in specific keywords, such as neurosurgery, paediatrics, cardiology, or even oncology.

Examples include:

PubMed screengrab.

Try them out!

Mobile Apps for Quick Updates

There are apps for everything, even staying current with new nursing research.

Try:

Some of these are web apps and some mobile apps. Dig around and find what works for you.

Save Time with AI

If you don’t have the time to read through the entirety of an article, try AI tools.

Sci-Hub, or typeset.io, is an AI chat for scientific papers. You submit the paper in AI format, and it summarises abstracts, outcomes, methodology and more in mere seconds.

Sci Hub

Another great tool? Google Gemini. A great prompt to use is “Explain the abstract to me like I’m 5” for easy-to-follow and dumbed-down explanations of key concepts. You can do the same with ChatGPT, too.

Where to Get Free Papers

Who wants to pay for papers? They can be monstrously expensive, especially ones by big journals or search engines like ResearchGate, Google Scolar, and PubMed. Hence, we’ve put together a guide on the best free sites to get journal articles.

Sci-Hub

Sci-Hub‘s mission is to make knowledge available to everyone, regardless of their economic status or class. It provides free and open access to over 85.4 million scientific articles and research papers, bypassing publishers’ paywalls and restrictions through various means. It’s slogan: Knowledge is a human right.

Similar resources (links in bold) include:

  • CORE: The world’s largest collection of open-access research papers
  • ScienceDirect: a free library of research papers.
  • DOAJ: similar to ScienceDirect.
  • Public Library of Science: a public library of papers.
  • OpenAIRE: Infrastructure for accessing scholarly publications and research data.
  • BioMed Central: publishing the best open-access journals across a portfolio of over 250 titles.
  • arXiv: a free distribution service and an open-access archive for nearly 2.4 million scholarly articles.
  • Mendely: over 100 million cross-publisher articles and counting.
  • BASE: academic search engine.
For textbooks:

Every research paper has DOI (Digital Object Identifier System) using that DOI you can access any research paper.

What If You Can’t Find A Paper?

Easy. Send an email to the author. In most cases, he/she will be more than happy to provide you with a copy. This is so common that Researchgate introduced the “request-full-text” button for new articles. You could also search the title in Google and add “filetype:pdf” to your query. This will probably dig up the working paper version and sometimes, even the original (or a scanned copy of it).

If you’re a student, know that academic institutions subscribe to a variety of journals (JSTOR, ResearchGate, etc.) Try to download the paper at the computer lab of your university. If your institution does not subscribe to the particular journal, ask the librarians. They are magicians in disguise.

Anna’s Archive

Anna’s Archive is a great research resource. They mirror other free literature archives like LibGen, Z-Lib, Internet Archive Lending Library, DuXiu, and more.

Unpaywall

Unpaywall is a popular Chrome and Edge extension that removes paywalls from research papers. It’s also a database stuffed with research papers.

How to Read Research Papers

It can be difficult to read papers if you’ve been out of university for a while or just haven’t done research for a while. Thus, the section below serves as a guide to reading research papers.

Essentially, almost all papers are composed of about 6 sections:

1. Abstract: outlines the content and purpose of the paper.
2. Introduction: introduces research.

Abstract of a research paper.
3. Basic concepts: concepts the reader should be familiar with.
4. Introduced concepts: newer concepts as introduced in the paper.

Basic and introduced concepts of a research paper.
5. Results: outcomes of the research.
6. Conclusion and future work: summary of research and what should be discussed and/or next explored.

Conclusion and future research in a research paper.

 

The usual way is to go about the paper one section after another: abstract, introduction, concepts, methodology, data, results, conclusions, and bibliography.

However, if you go about it that way you will be less likely to be able to grasp the concepts. Most probably, you’ll get bored by the time you reach the 4th section, the introduced concepts. It’s more worth it to directly refer to the results section and observe how the results have been obtained, as well as the methods have been employed to obtain results.

After this, you’ll get a fair idea of what the author wants to express. Then, go to the “Introduced concepts” part. Well-written and formatted journal articles will have at the most 2 new concepts that they explain in detail. Remember to refer back to the basic concepts to understand the topics you are finding tough. This way, you will be able to relate basic concepts to the ones being introduced. After this, go to the abstract and compare what you have understood and the contents of the paper.

If you’d like to truly understand the paper, grab a pad of paper and pen, and write down questions you have as you skim through into a question bank. Then, read the article in-depth and find answers. This ensures you have a thorough understanding of the concepts, methodology, and results.

If you’d like, you can follow the following bolded link to read the paper above: The molecular basis of leukaemia.

Nursing Blogs

Nursing blogs also hold treasure troves of information. Here are a few of our favourites. The links are in bold.

For Career Development and Advancement:

  • Daily Nurse: Features articles on current nursing issues, career advice, and navigating challenges in the profession.
  • Nurse Keith’s Digital Doorway: Focuses on coaching nurses for career advancement and maintaining work-life balance.
  • Nursing Notes: a UK-based nurse blog. All blogs to follow are by UK authors.
  • Nursing Times: like the New York Times, but London.
  • Evidence-Based Nursing: critical commentaries and summaries of the most valid research in nursing, from other international healthcare journals.
  • Big City, Little Nurse: award-winning student nurse online magazine. It’s a place where honest reviews meet informative content, with a little light-hearted fun along the way.

Have a look at them!

How to Make Time for Research

Sometimes, it can be tricky to make time for research with a nurse’s packed schedule. Thus, this section offers helpful tips and tricks for staying up-to-date with research as a healthcare professional.

Follow Professional Organizations

It may be worthwhile to follow nursing organisations. It also looks great on your CV!

Serving on boards or volunteering opens doors to:

  • Expand your network: Connect with influential figures in your field and create valuable relationships.
  • Sharpen your leadership skills: Take on challenges and guide others, building your leadership capabilities: great preparation for senior roles
  • Step outside your comfort zone: Try new things and develop a wider range of professional skills.

You get to gain valuable experience while making a positive impact on your profession.

Also, staying current in your practice and staying up to date on current issues and opportunities is easier when you belong to a professional organisation. You could also talk to other nurses working in your chosen speciality to exchange knowledge and create a sense of community, and create job opportunities if they mention their facility is hiring. Also, you’ll have the opportunity to build a national or international network to share ideas, research, and experiences, and make career connections.

Additionally, a lot of organisations lobby for causes they believe in, like; sponsored continuing education, better nurse safety practices, or mental health resources to reduce nurse burnout and compassion fatigue.

Nursing Associations in the UK

Here is a list of organisations you could join, with links to their websites in bold.

Specialty Associations

If you don’t see an organisation for your speciality, Google organisations in the UK for (x) nurses.

Develop a Research Routine

It’s also important to be intentional about nursing research. This means making time for reading, whether a few times a week or a few times a month.

  • Allocate dedicated time for research exploration. Block out a time in your calendar, either during your lunch break, a day off or after work, to read.
  • Focus on specific areas of interest within your nursing speciality. For example, if you’re interested in forensic nursing practice, find articles about it. This helps retain an interest in your speciality, and perhaps other specialities.
  • Join a journal club or research discussion group with colleagues. If there isn’t one, start one. There are lots of Reddit forums you could join, too, if you aren’t a huge fan of meeting in person with colleagues. Think of it as a sort of book club.

Examples of online forums (links in bold) include:

Applying Research to Practice

When interpreting research papers into practice involves using critical thinking skills and nursing sixth sense to analyse the study data and its results.

Results tell you the success of the used methodology and suggest ways you can implement researchers’ findings. This is called knowledge translation (also known as research dissemination, diffusion or knowledge uptake in the USA, and knowledge translation and knowledge‐to‐action in Australia and Canada).

It’s important to note that not all research is readily able to be implemented. Interestingly, the chasm between the publication of evidence and its implementation into practice is referred to as an evidence-practice gap. 

Translating research into applicable practice involves the following steps, as per Kate Curtis’ paper; Translating research findings to clinical nursing practice.

  1. Identify the problem and find relevant research.
  2.  Adapt the research to your local context.
  3. Assess any barriers to using the knowledge (and find solutions).
  4. Select, tailor and implement interventions– be careful. These are people’s lives and their health we’re dealing with.
  5. Monitor knowledge use. You could even do your own research and document any progressions for other nurses.
  6. Evaluate outcomes of new practices.
  7.  Sustain knowledge use. (A.K.A., keep doing what you’re doing.)

For the record, an enabler is a factor that makes it easier for nurses to implement research findings in their clinical work. Below is an illustration of the process to follow.

Knowledge implementation cycle.

You can use the following four-step intervention to implement your newfound knowledge, as developed by the PARIHYS framework (explained in the above paper, linked in bold).

  1. Who needs to do what differently and why?
  2. Using a theoretical framework, which barriers and enablers need to be addressed?
  3. Which intervention components (behaviour change techniques and mode(s) of delivery) could overcome the changeable barriers and better the enablers?
  4. How can behaviour change to be measured and understood?

Remember to use your question bank to answer these queries.

Key Takeaways

It’s vital to stay updated on research in your chosen speciality of nursing.

You are now equipped with the means to implement research, discuss research, and access research. If you’re passionate about nursing research, consider becoming a research nurse.

To access healthcare facilities and hospitals that pioneer change in the healthcare sector, contact Proximity Healthcare. We’ll be sure to place you in a setting that meets your needs and drives change with evidence-based practice while fostering a positive and collaborative enviroment.