Nursing Research Paper

[chewe]

I am presently taking the RN-BSN Program, and had to write a research paper. For one, I don't know what topic to use, and two, I am not sure how the format should look like. Does anyone have good suggestions, or ideas how to get the right format? Help....:innerconf

[shock-me-sane]

APA format. You can buy the book or there is info on the web too.

Sorry I don't have any ideas for your research topic.

[llg, PhD, RN]

What instructions have you received from your teacher? That's where you should start. Your course syllabus, your textbook, and your professor should point you in the right direction for a format etc.

As for a topic, pick a general topic that interests youu (and is relevent to your likely career path) and then browse the literature related to that topic. You can go to a library tha includes nursing journals to browse journal articles -- or you can browse on the Internet if you know how to do that. As you browse the literature, begin to narrow down your focus to one that seems particularly interesting to you and make copies of those articles to use as sources for your paper.

[Daytonite, BSN, RN]

for topics, you need to go to the library and go to the nursing guide to periodical literature and peruse the topics until you find one you like. if you can't find it, ask the research librarian to help you. then, pull some articles and start reading to see if it's something you think you'll like doing a research paper about. you can also look at articles in current nursing journals and if there is something you like, pull the articles in the references or bibliography and start reading to see what kind of a research project you might be able to make of it.

when i was in my bsn program i did a research proposal on nurses getting physically injured by patients. turns out there was a nurse who was actively involved in doing research on this in a psychiatric facility where nurses were regularly getting hit by violent patients. i found a number of research articles related to this subject and also wrote to this particular nurse who generously sent me a copy of her current article that had appeared in a nursing journal and her testing tool (a questionnaire) that she was basing much of her data collection on. and, that's how you do something like this. it is not something that you start doing 3 days before the paper is due.

when you say "right format", are you talking about fonts and the typing of the actual paper? or, are you referring to how the actual content of the paper needs to be organized and written?

every research paper should be organized as follows:

1. introduction: introduction of research problem introduction of objectives introduction of how objectives will be achieved (methodology)
   
2. literature review: review of previous work relating to research problem (to define, explain, justify) review of previous work relating to methodology (to define, explain, justify) review of previous work relating to results (particularly reliability, etc.)
   
3. method (how the results were achieved): explanation of how data was collected/generated, explanation of how data was analyzed explanation of methodological problems and their solutions or effects
   
4. results and discussion: presentation of results interpretation of results discussion of results (e.g. comparison with results in previous research, effects of methods used on the data obtained)
   
5. conclusions: has the research problem been "solved"? to what extent have the objectives been achieved? what has been learned from the results? how can this knowledge be used? what are the shortcomings of the research, or the research methodology? etc.