Research Appraisal
If you’re tackling research appraisal as part of your essay, it’s an exercise looking very closely at the study you’re considering, and then zooming out and applying what you found to the whole question.
When appraising research I find using my PC with two screens (monitors) to be incredibly helpful. Often you can find a second-hand monitor for not very much (I used to have a laptop which I sometimes hooked up to a second-hand monitor with an HDMI cable, this stuff doesn’t have to cost very much. Sometimes asking friends who work in software engineering or IT are good to approach as their company will likely update their tech pretty often and have older models to give away or to sell cheaply.
The books I mentioned are below (again, no affiliation). Remember that these are massive books, you can use ctrl+f if you’re using e-books and jump to what you need to understand so you can give yourself a short refresher about the particular kind of research you’re needing to comment on. 80/20 also applies, these are not the kinds of books that you need to read cover to cover. It’s more about ‘gutting’ the text and finding what you need for your essay.
I’d also recommend www.sarawickham.com, Dr. Wickham is one of our best teachers when it comes to midwifery and research.
Other rules for including research appraisal in your essay:
Aim to only include research that has been published in the last 3-5 years. (For some topics, you will not have enough to draw on so you’ll have to go further back but you should justify why this is in your essay).
If you’re confused about how to search for literature, your university library should be able to help you with a one to one session.
Research appraisal resources that students have found helpful:
Searching with Cinahl, guide here
MIDIRS literature search packs
Systematic reviews such as those from the Cochrane library are good high-quality sources of evidence
To work out how significant a journal is, you can look at the ‘impact factor’, which is calculated based on the average number of citations. To quote Amy Brown ‘the argument is that the more a paper is cited the more important it is. I use Web of Science for impact factors but you can check with your library to see if they have a preferred tool.