Improving Nursing Education Research
The article reviewed for this assignment is "Methodological quality and scientific impact of quantitative nursing education research over 18 months" by Yucha et al. The related topic of this particular article involves research about the education of nurses. Specifically, the authors wanted to examine research articles that were about the various sorts of methods and factors that pertained to nursing research. The vast majority of such research pertained to continuing education and patient research (Yucha et al., 2011, p. 362); although the articles were concerned with virtually any article containing original research regarding any facet of education for nurses. The principle factor that spawned the interest of the authors is that there has been a reduction in original research pertaining to nursing education. This phenomenon is partially explained in the context of the majority of research in nursing slowly evolving towards clinical issues, while neglecting that which is related to nursing education (Yucha et al., 2011, p. 363). Moreover, the authors elucidate the fact that there is a general dearth of funding pertaining to articles with original research that is focused on education. This shortage of funds exists across a variety of disciplines, yet has impacted that on nursing educational research in that there is a lack of quality articles dedicated to this topic. The implications are that this lack of quality,...
363), may actually contribute to the lack of funding for articles on nursing education.
What the authors chose to do in this article was to apply a quantitative evaluation method known as the Medical Education Research Study Quality Instrument (MRSQI) (p. 363), which was designed for medical articles, to those pertaining to nursing education. The goal was to analyze the quality of those articles within this framework to determine what sort of impact that further utilization of this method could have on quality nursing articles. The authors hypothesized that the articles that received higher scores with the MRSQI instrument would have better quality than those that did not, and that there were a number of different ways that could quantify this fact. There were a couple of different variables that the authors used to determine whether an article actually produced a significant amount of quality, which was based on citation counts, jounrla impact factors, and the first author's h index. The research question for the article was could the MRSQI instrument be applied to articles other than general medical education, such as nursing education, and indicate a substantial degree of quality and efficacy. Again, in regards to this research question the authors hypothesized that there was…
