The Research Cycle
This shape described the research life cycle.
What is a circle?
This is the tendency for positive results to get published more often than negative ones
What is publication bias?
True or false: all searching is basically the same, regardless of tool or database.
What is false?
"How many patients had a lab value above X" is an example of this type of research.
What is Quantitative?
In an RCT, this term means neither participants nor researchers know who's in which group.
What is double blind?
This is the correct way to think of AI, not as an authority but as this.
This is a real risk of AI-generated content, even when it sounds completely confident.
It can fabricate information/sources.
Name one legitimate use for AI this course actually endorses.
What are brainstorming, organizing, or mechanical writing tasks?
Interviewing patients about what an experience actually felt like is an example of this type of research
What is Qualitative?
A detailed look at one unusual patient, often the first signal something's worth investigating, is this design.
What is a case study?
This term describes a hypothesis that has a real chance of being proven wrong.
What is "falsifiable"?
Name one reason journals tend to favor positive findings
They're more interesting or more likely to be cited
This is the main difference between casual and structured searching.
What is being exact vs guessing?
This is the standard used to judge qualitative research — whether findings genuinely reflect what participants experienced.
What is credibility?
A study that follows people forward over time, collecting new data as it happens, is this design.
What is a prospective study?
Publish Report doesn't end the cycle — it feeds back into this step.
What is Search & Discover?
This is the actual, practical thing you should do about publication bias in your own writing.
What is name it as a limitation in your writing.
This is what your very first, vague-topic search is meant to check.
Whether the topic exists / is worth pursuing
For your capstone, this matters more than whether your topic is quantitative or qualitative
Whether comparable studies exist
This is what actually determines which study design a researcher chooses.
What the evidence or research question requires
Your capstone this semester lives mostly in this space — searching, evaluating, and synthesizing existing work
What is Scholarly Work?
This is why publication bias matters when you're reading someone else's research.
The picture may be incomplete or skewed.
Your second, structured search becomes this for your capstone.
What is your core evidence base?
The same topic — say, patient satisfaction after a procedure — could be studied either quantitatively or qualitatively. This is what actually determines which approach fits.
The specific research question being asked (not the topic itself).
If you use AI substantively in your work, AMA style requires you to do this
What is disclose/acknowledge it.