The Institute of Medicine (IOM) defines a clinical practice guideline as “a scientific investigation that focuses on a specific question and uses explicit, prespecified scientific methods to identify, select, assess, and summarize the findings of similar but separate studies.” Similar to systematic reviews and meta-analyses, these publication types contain a wealth of information on a given clinical topic/question. Take a look at the resources below from the MSK Library website for finding guidelines. Continue reading →

When it comes to measuring the impact, influence, or relevance of a given article, many researchers look to the metrics surrounding that publication. Metrics, in this case, refers to the number of times a paper has been cited by other investigators (AKA – cited references). Another way to gauge the impact of a paper is via Altmetrics, a relatively new way of examining the social media coverage and lay press surrounding published research. Both modes of evaluating article-level metric information is acceptable, each with their own benefits and shortcomings. Discovering metrics about an article is commonly referred to by the umbrella term known as bibliometrics. Follow the steps below for some hands-on experience with each of these citation metric methods and try incorporating them into your research workflow!

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The Health and Psychosocial Instruments (HAPI) database provides a corpus of literature where the research focuses on survey, questionnaire, or instrumentation regarding data collection. HAPI uniquely indexes these articles by the tool itself, rather than the paper title and other citation information like most standard databases. This allows the user to see actual surveys or tools being used to understand a topic rather than simply the research being done surrounding a topic, generally.

Try a simple search phrase like patient satisfaction. The results displayed are the names of the surveys/questionnaires used by the investigators for that given research paper. The full citation for the published paper can be found just below the name of the survey. If you are searching for example questionnaires similar to research you plan on conducting here at MSK, give HAPI a try! As always, you can ask us and someone from the reference team would be happy to offer assistance in locating measurement tools and surveys.