Kinesiology Question-content expert on a particular topic in health and also know how to use scientific databases to locate reliable health information.

The aim of this assignment is to make ourselves (even) better consumers of health information.

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The specific purposes are to:

1) learn more about a topic or issue in health that interests you

2) introduce how to access and use scientific literature

3) learn about a scoping style review.

After completing this assignment you will be a content expert on a particular topic in health and also know how to use scientific databases to locate reliable health information.

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To complete the assignment you will write a paper on a specific topic or issue in health, and report the amount of research in that area. Your paper will be 2500-3500 words long (8 – 12+ pages, depending on formatting) and use a ‘scoping review’ format.

Watch the video below for a quick overview and then read/view the next modules. These will tell you what a scoping review is and provide a ‘how to’ on each section of your paper.

Sample outline and description of each section:

WORD: /content/enforced/33366-KIN-2305-050-U2020W/Topic in Health – review paper example and instructions.docx

PDF: /content/enforced/33366-KIN-2305-050-U2020W/Topic in Health – review paper example and instructions.pdf

1) What is a scoping review?

The aim of this module is to provide some perspective on different types of review papers and to introduce scoping reviews. Read the text below and then watch the accompanying video.

WHAT IS A REVIEW PAPER?

When someone asks us to write ‘a paper’, often they are asking us to summarize or explain what is known about a particular topic (or occasionally, supporting a particular point of view). Doing so usually involves reading a number of journal articles (hopefully) or other sources of information. That process – of drawing from a variety of sources and then summarizing them – describes writing a ‘review article’. That is in comparison to writing an article that describes the findings of a single study or experiment.

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WHAT ARE DIFFERENT TYPES OF REVIEW PAPERS?

If we performed the process described above – selected papers to read based upon our own choice and then summarized them – we would be writing a narrative review. One drawback of this process is that the answers (or summary) we provide can depend heavily on which papers we choose to include….that is, our summary may be ‘biased’. This is usually not a desirable quality in science.

One way to mitigate that source of bias is to use repeatable methods. Much like doing an experiment we can apply a standardized methodology to the process of writing review papers. That methodology would allow other people to reproduce (and verify) our results. These specific review methods chosen will differ depending on why someone is writing a review paper.

Many scientists and clinicians like ‘systematic reviews‘. These reviews often try to answer a clinical question: how well a treatment works (or not), or whether a certain factor/exposure causes disease. That usually means having a fairly narrow clinical question (such as: ‘Is therapeutic ultrasound an effective treatment for lateral epicondylitis’), and then locating all the randomized controlled trials testing that treatment against placebo &/or other interventions. Sometimes advanced statistics are used to report the findings. Systematic reviews can be complex and are almost always written by experts in the field.

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WHAT IS A SCOPING REVIEW?

Scoping reviews are a newer type of review, which Arksey and O’Malley (2005) describe as studies that aim to: map the available literature in an area, along with the main sources and types of information available.

So, if you were new to an area, or weren’t sure how much had already been published, a scoping review might be a good place to start. Some researchers will use scoping reviews to determine whether they should even bother with a systematic review, or to help identify gaps or areas that haven’t been studied.

One advantage of scoping reviews is that they do not require (quite) as much prior knowledge as a systematic review. Another advantage is that they (still) use a repeatable methodology. And finally, the results of scoping reviews are often ‘descriptive’, rather than replying on complicated statistical models. However, scoping reviews are still valuable contributions to literature (as even systematic reviews have limitations).

So, for this assignment we’re going to use some of the ideas from scoping reviews about methodology and reporting results to help us learn more about our topic. Instead of performing an entire scoping review – which can take many months – we’re going to include two main features: 1) our search strategy (in a methods section); 2) how much and what type of information exists (in a results section).

How to do each of those is shown in the next modules.

References

Arksey, H., & O’Malley, L. (2005). Scoping studies: Towards a methodological framework. Journal of Social Research Methodology, 8(1), 19-32.

Watch the video below for more information and an example of a scoping review

2) Determining your topic and writing a purpose statement?

The aim of this module is to help us refine the topic or issue we’ll write about. You will also learn what a purpose and thesis statement are in the context of a scoping review.

Choosing the topic or issue to write about is likely the first step in writing our paper. There are many different ways to go about determining the topic or issue you will write about. For example, it might be something you experienced personally, learned about in another course, heard in the media, or perhaps even read about in this course.

Regardless, once you have a general idea of your topic, it’s time to refine that topic into a purpose and/or thesis statement. As an example, you might be interested in marginalized or under-represented communities and health outcomes….however ‘marginalized communities is not a topic by itself – it describes (vaguely) a population or cohort of individuals (and a high priority one at that), but requires more information to form a purpose or thesis statement for a paper.

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PURPOSE STATEMENTS

Your purpose statement will tell the reader about the scope, direction and specific focus of your paper. It won’t make any specific claim about the findings or how you’ll interpret the results (that’s what a thesis statement does). Although there is some variation in terminology, a purpose statement is very similar to an ‘aim’ or even ‘objective’ of a study.

Your purpose statement should:

1) Tell the reader what you’re going to do. In this case it’s quite easy: we’re all going to write a paper that describes a topic in health in the context of the 6 (or 7) dimensions of wellness. Instead of using words like ‘describe’ you might also choose phrases such as ‘identify contributing factors’, ‘provide background’, ‘demonstrate the importance of…’ and so on.

2) Identify the population of interest. In the example above, ‘marginalized individuals’ is not specific enough. This should be refined to focus on a specific cohort, population or other characteristics. For example, ‘individuals experiencing homelessness’ is a specific marginalized or under-represented community.

3) Be specific to an outcome, intervention, exposure, factor, circumstance, or other facet of health. Instead of using health or wellness in general, try to refine your area of interest: this could be by focusing on any of the specific items in the previous sentence. For example, we may be interested in factors such as food insecurities, the effects of adverse weather conditions, or access to specific health supports for individuals experiencing homelessness (e.g. oral, psychological, reproductive, substance use/addiction, etc).

Your purpose statement should be the last line in your introduction. More importantly, your reader should be able to guess what your purpose statement is by the time they got there (but before they’ve read it).

Example purpose statement: The purpose of this paper is to describe food insecurities faced by individuals experiencing homelessness and the relationship to physical, emotional and interpersonal wellness.

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THESIS STATEMENTS – AN ALTERNATIVE TO PURPOSE STATEMENTS

Although most papers in health sciences will use only a purpose statement, in some cases (or areas) this will be replaced with a thesis statement. A primary difference between a purpose and thesis statement is that a thesis statement takes a particular stance or position on an area. Thesis statements give the reader an indication of the rationale and conclusions about the topic.

If you’d prefer, you can write a thesis statement instead of a purpose statement. However, you’ll likely be better able to write your thesis statement after you’ve finished writing your paper (i.e. once you’ve learned about the particular topic).

Example thesis statement: Food insecurities contribute numerous deleterious, but preventable, effects to the physical and emotional wellness of individuals experiencing homelessness. Improving access to basic food sources should be high priority for public and policy makers.

3) Writing the introduction?

The aim of this short module is to help write the introduction to your paper, using a style consistent with health research.

Read the information under ‘Introduction’ in the paper outline and watch the video below for more detail.

NOTE: you will (very likely) write your introduction after you’ve gathered some sources (articles) on your topic and performed some of the searches described in the methods and results section.

https://uwinnipeg.ca.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Emb…

4) How to search PubMed and what to report in methods?

For those of you new or still ‘warming up’ to finding/reading research articles, this module will likely contain most of the ‘how to’ for the assignment.

Specifically, it will demonstrate: 1) how to search for articles on PubMed; 2) what types of articles you might want to read; 3) how to find the full text of an article; 4) what information to write in the methods section of your paper.

This information is provided in a few short videos.

1. How to search on PubMed: general searches, Booleans, filters

https://uwinnipeg.ca.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Emb…

2. What types of articles to read: it’s unreasonable to expect us to read all of the articles on a topic, so how can we choose articles that provide the best ‘bang for the buck’? What is the evidence hierarchy? What are predatory journals?

https://uwinnipeg.ca.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Emb…

3. Finding the full text of an article: open source, institutional access

https://uwinnipeg.ca.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Emb…

4. What goes in the methods section?

In the methods section of your paper you should include enough information so that another person could do the same search as you (i.e. that your search will be reproducible).

In the case of our paper we will make it fairly straightforward and you should report: the date of the search, the search terms (as entered in pubmed), any other filters (e.g. date ranges), the number of articles returned, the name of the database (presumably PubMed). You may also want to provide the original Arksey and O’Malley reference for scoping reviews and state that you are using a framework provided by them.

The majority of this information should be provided in paragraph form and as usual, separated by topic. As an example, you may choose to have one paragraph describing the search details and a second indicating any framework, approach or other information relevant to your discussion (rather than all in one paragraph and/or ‘randomly’ scattered about). I’d recommend staying away from bulleted lists, although you might choose to report your search terms/info in a table (e.g. similar to how some systematic reviews go about it – but only if there’s enough information for a table…I wouldn’t create a table that contains just a single search term – that’d be best reported as text).

5) Results: summarizing data, making tables and figures?

This video covers the essential components of the table/figure and text for your results section.

https://uwinnipeg.ca.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Emb…

This video demonstrates how to make/format a table (Word) and figure (Excel).

https://uwinnipeg.ca.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Emb…

6) Ideas for the discussion?

The intention of the discussion section of your paper is to address your purpose statement – that is to provide more information on a specific topic or issue in health.

There are many different ways you could go about this and/or aspects you could include (e.g. summary of information, common themes, gaps in the literature, limitations, etc) – which one(s) you include will depend on the topic or issue (that is, not all aspects listed above or in the outline will be applicable to all topics).

Lastly, you can draw information from different sources for this section. For example, some of this might come from a paper you found in your literature search, but it could also include texts, news articles, or peer-reviewed literature found from other searches. As an example, most of the ‘topics’ or ‘issues’ lectures I put together for this course get their information from 1-2 review papers, occasionally supplemented by other sources.

https://uwinnipeg.ca.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Emb…

7) Citing your sources and APA