¶ … Paravic-Klijn et al. (2009) is an example of a strong level of research evidence. This is not only because the study was quantitative but because it used an integrative massive amount of material as its source. These included 119 Latin American nursing journals and 13,208 scientific documents. The study was prompted by the realization that nurses working in regions of Latin America have difficulty in accessing research that is authored in their language and structured according to their experience and that, moreover, much of the methodology of the research material (produced by Latin American medical practitioners) is flawed. This, in turn, has historically had a negative impact on the nursing practice in Latin American regions of America. Wanting to study how Latin American nursing research developed (and the language of its scientific communication), the authors investigated relevant nursing research materials from different publications and types of documents that were geared towards, or that were about, the Latin American medical community. All were published by Latin American nursing...

According to Maltras (2003), three types of bibliometric indicators are used to measure quality (impact factor), relationships (collaboration), and scientific activity (quantification and temporal evolution of production). In this study, we used the latter, which can be obtained through simple computations of journals and articles or some of their components (titles, authors, affiliations, and so on) (p.55)
In other words, the authors used statistical data to investigate whether any patterns existed in the examined material and whether these patterns differed from comparative research on the subject. The reliability of the document recovery was further corroborated by quantitative work.

In short, the methodology…