Research Foundations
This approach to nutrition care combines scientific evidence with professional expertise and the preferences of the patient or client.
What is evidence-based practice?
Nutrition researchers commonly use this database to locate biomedical and health research articles.
What is PubMed?
This university committee reviews research involving people before participant recruitment begins.
What is the Institutional Review Board (IRB)?
Researchers measure college students' caffeine intake and sleep quality during one survey administered this semester.
What is a cross-sectional study?
In an experiment examining whether different amounts of dietary protein affect muscle recovery, the amount of protein assigned by the researcher is this variable.
What is the independent variable?
A researcher develops a question, collects data according to a plan, analyzes the results, and draws conclusions. This organized approach is characteristic of this process.
What is research (or) the research process (or) the scientific method?
Instead of searching PubMed for “high blood pressure,” a researcher uses the standardized indexing term “Hypertension.” This is an example of using these controlled vocabulary terms.
What are MeSH terms?
Participants must understand what a study involves and voluntarily agree to participate through this ethical process.
What is informed consent?
Researchers begin with adults who have colorectal cancer and adults who do not, then examine their previous dietary patterns.
What is a case-control study?
In that same experiment, muscle recovery measured after the intervention would be this type of variable.
What is the dependent variable?
Unlike a review article, this type of journal article reports data collected directly by the researchers conducting the study.
What is a primary research article?
Government reports, conference proceedings, and technical reports that are not published in traditional peer-reviewed journals fall into this category.
What is grey literature?
A researcher invents blood glucose measurements for three participants who missed their final study visit. This form of research misconduct involves making up data that never existed.
What is fabrication?
Researchers group adults according to whether they regularly consume whole grains and follow them over time to see who develops cardiovascular disease.
What is a cohort study?
Research that takes discoveries from the laboratory and moves them toward clinical care and eventually community practice is commonly described by this term.
What is translational research?
You would expect to find participant recruitment, measurements, and study procedures described in this section of a research article.
What is the Methods section?
An article that anyone can read online without paying a subscription fee or having university access is described this way.
What is open access?
A researcher changes several measurements because the original values do not support the hypothesis.
What is falsification?
Participants are randomly assigned to receive either a Mediterranean-style dietary intervention or usual care.
What is a randomized controlled trial (RCT)?
In PICOS, this letter identifies the specific result researchers plan to measure, such as blood pressure, LDL cholesterol, or body weight.
What is O — Outcome?
Before a scientific article is accepted for publication, other researchers with expertise in the field evaluate its quality and scientific rigor through this process.
What is peer review?
A student finds 2,000 PubMed results but only wants human studies published within the last five years. These search tools can help narrow the results.
What are filters?
A researcher copies several sentences from another author's article into a manuscript without quotation marks or attribution.
What is plagiarism?
Researchers test whether a nutrition intervention that worked under tightly controlled conditions also works when implemented in ordinary clinics with typical patients and providers.
What is an effectiveness/pragmatic study?
Before searching for evidence, a researcher specifies the population, intervention, comparison, and outcomes of interest. The researcher is developing this essential starting point for an evidence analysis.
What is a research question/PICOS question?