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Developing Research Skills for Evidence and Enquiry for Practice (HWLS): Home

Welcome to Developing your Research Skills for Your Level 5 Assignment!

It's really important in fields of Nursing, Midwifery, Health and Social Care to find good quality, up to date literature and evidence! As it's so important to find the best evidence and literature for your topic, you will need to develop good research skills to enable you to do this.

In your first year, you have probably used Library Search to find resources, and using databases is very similar. However, databases have a wider range of functions that you can use to help you find the most appropriate literature. Databases allow you to use more complex search strategies and techniques, and this guide is going to help you to develop those skills, in readiness for your research project at Level 6.

About this guide: The guide is divided into the key parts of doing good quality research. Each tab covers an element of the process and is closely aligned with the structure of your assessment brief, attached below. At the top of each section is a description of what you will learn in that tab. It's better if you can work through it logically, but you can drop in and out of whatever you need, when you need it!

Assignment

Your assignment for this module is a critical exploration of research methodology. You need to find two papers from one database that are related to your chosen professional field. You need to formulate a search strategy to find these papers, which you then need to show as a screenshot in your assignment. The assessment brief (attached below) gives you the exact details of what you need to do for this assignment, so if you follow the process it outlines you will pass the assessment and even get good marks!

The topic you choose to explore is the vehicle to allow you to find the research papers you need. So please try not to focus too much on the topic, as you will not be commenting on the information contained in the papers. Your focus should be identifying two papers to critique their research methodology.

Reading List for Evidence & Enquiry for Practice

There's also a reading list for this assignment - you can find it on the module site homepage, or see the link below. The reading list is all about research methodology. So when you have identified your papers, you can read about the methodology you have selected! We've also digitised a key chapter on 'recruitment and data selection', which you can find at the top of the list. Here's the link:

Evidence and Enquiry for Practice reading list

 

 

Your Subject Guide

You can find more information related to finding literature and evidence for your chosen professional area in your dedicated subject guides. These guides are created and maintained by your Subject Librarian from their specialist knowledge of your subject areas. We have divided them into three specialist areas: Nursing & Midwifery, Allied Health, and Social Work and Social Care.

The guides contain lots of specialist information for your profession, such as professional information, unique resources to each area and links to other specialist databases that may be of use in the next level of your studies.

You can find the links to your dedicated Subject Guide here:

(We're Librarians so they are in alphabetical order reflecting no preference for specific subjects!).

Where Can I Get Help?

There is lots more help in the 'introduction to literature searching' folder in your module site. There is a section called 'introduction to literature searching' which has a comprehensive set of resources to help you with starting your search for your papers. You should have completed this by this time. If you haven't, it's important that you revisit this information.

You can get help with quick questions using Library chat, or you can get in touch with the Library through the student portal or Hallam Help points. Here are some useful help links: