Common practice vs best practice: clinical inquiry guide
A two-part clinical inquiry assignment: a 4- to 5-slide presentation on a chosen clinical issue and the search behind it, plus a Matrix Worksheet analysing four peer-reviewed articles. This guide covers the systematic-review ban that makes the matrix answerable, the filtered-versus-unfiltered trap it is coupled to, and the ethics requirement hidden in a subordinate clause.
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Last reviewed · August 6, 2026
The one sentence in the preparation notes that decides the assignment
Two deliverables, four articles, and one sentence in the preparation notes that decides whether either of them can be completed as specified: You should not be using systematic reviews for this assignment, select original research articles.
That instruction cuts directly against the course's own required reading. Melnyk and Fineout-Overholt's chapter on asking compelling clinical questions teaches an evidence hierarchy in which systematic reviews sit at or near the top, so a student who has absorbed the reading will reach for precisely what the assignment forbids. The reason is not in Part 1; it is in Part 2. The matrix asks for the research methodology used and then for the reliability and validity of how that methodology was applied. A systematic review's methodology is its search protocol and synthesis method, not a design that generated data from participants, so the strengths column has nothing to describe and the reliability question has no referent. The ban is not arbitrary strictness. It is the condition that makes the matrix answerable at all, and it is why the brief says original research rather than merely peer-reviewed — a review is peer-reviewed too.
The preparation notes also ask you to reflect on using an unfiltered database, and that word is coupled to the systematic-review ban more tightly than it looks. Library resources divide into filtered ones, where somebody has already appraised and synthesised the evidence, and unfiltered ones that return primary studies as published. Systematic reviews are what filtered resources are made of. So reaching for a filtered resource breaks both instructions in a single move, and it happens because filtered resources are easier and return cleaner-looking results. The second half of the same instruction is equally literal: search at least four different databases means four databases, not four articles out of one. Part 1 requires you to name them on a slide, which is exactly where that shortcut becomes visible to the marker. Four databases also means four search histories worth recording as you go.
Part 2's second bullet reads as one requirement and contains two. It asks why you chose the article and how it relates to your clinical issue, including a brief explanation of the ethics of research related to your clinical issue of interest. That is a whole scoring line buried inside a subordinate clause, and it is the item most often missed entirely. What it wants is not a general paragraph about the Belmont Report. It wants respect for persons, beneficence and justice applied to your issue specifically: consent capacity if the population is cognitively impaired, coercion risk if subjects are recruited from your own caseload, equitable selection if the condition falls hardest on one group. Four articles means four such notes, one per row, and they should not be the same sentence four times. The ethics of a chart-review study and the ethics of a trial that randomised patients away from usual care are not the same discussion, and the row is where that difference belongs.
Be specific is doing real work in the methodology bullet. Calling a study quantitative is not specific; calling it a prospective cohort, a cross-sectional survey, a quasi-experimental pre-post design or a two-arm randomised controlled trial is. The same holds on the other side, where phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography and descriptive qualitative work make different claims and answer different questions. The strengths column then has to speak the matching language, and this is where matrices come apart. Internal consistency, construct validity and effect sizes belong to the quantitative rows. Credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability belong to the qualitative ones. Applying Cronbach's alpha to a phenomenological study is the single clearest signal that a row was filled in rather than read. Where a study is mixed-methods, both vocabularies are needed and the row has to say which criterion applies to which strand rather than blending them.
One line in the preparation notes has consequences well past this submission: This clinical issue will remain the same for the entire course and will be the basis for the development of your PICOT question. Choosing the issue on how interesting it sounds, rather than on whether four original studies actually exist for it across four databases, sets up every later assignment in the course to be harder than it needed to be. The order to work in is therefore the reverse of the intuitive one: run exploratory searches on two or three candidate issues first, see which returns primary research rather than reviews and commentary, and commit only then. A narrower issue with a real primary literature beats a broad one that returns nothing but syntheses, because the PICOT question you build later has to be answerable from studies that exist. Ten minutes of searching before the choice saves the rest of the term.
Matrix column | For a quantitative article | For a qualitative article |
|---|---|---|
Methodology, be specific | Name the design: RCT, cohort, case-control, cross-sectional survey, quasi-experimental | Name the tradition: phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, descriptive qualitative |
Strengths | Randomisation, control of confounding, sample size and power, generalisability | Depth, participant voice, context, suitability for a question about how or why |
Reliability | Internal consistency, test-retest, inter-rater agreement | Dependability — an audit trail others could follow |
Validity | Internal and external validity, construct and criterion validity | Credibility, transferability and confirmability — the trustworthiness criteria |
Likely learning objectives
Inferred from the brief — check these against your own rubric.
- 01Distinguish original research from synthesised evidence and explain why an assignment might require the former.
- 02Tell a filtered library resource from an unfiltered one and choose the right kind for a stated purpose.
- 03Name a study's specific design rather than its broad methodological family.
- 04Apply reliability and validity criteria in the vocabulary appropriate to the design being appraised.
- 05Relate research ethics principles to a particular clinical population rather than to research in general.
Read the full question
Review every instruction before using the planning guidance that follows.
What the slides and the Matrix Worksheet each require
- 01A 4- to 5-slide PowerPoint presentation covering the clinical issue, the keyword search, the four databases and four APA citations.
- 02A completed Matrix Worksheet with one row per article.
- 03Four peer-reviewed original research articles, not systematic reviews.
- 04Articles drawn from at least four different databases.
- 05Per article: full APA citation; a one-paragraph rationale including the ethics of research related to the clinical issue; a one- to two-paragraph description of aims; a one- to two-paragraph description of the methodology identifying it as qualitative, quantitative or mixed-methods; and a one- to two-paragraph description of methodological strengths including reliability and validity.
Searching first, then choosing the clinical issue
Test two or three candidate issues before committing to one
Run exploratory searches on each candidate and keep the one that returns original research across several databases.
Build the search, then record how you built it
Note the keywords, synonyms and Boolean combinations used, and which database each was run in, while searching rather than afterwards.
Select four original studies from four databases
Screen out reviews and syntheses; keep studies that generated their own data, and vary the designs if you can.
Slides — the issue and the search
Describe the clinical issue, the keyword strategy, the four databases and the four APA citations across 4 to 5 slides.
Matrix rows — rationale and research ethics
For each article, say why it was chosen and how research ethics bear on your clinical issue and that study's population.
Matrix rows — aims and methodology
State each study's aims, then name its design specifically and classify it as qualitative, quantitative or mixed-methods.
Matrix rows — strengths, reliability and validity
Describe what each design did well and appraise reliability and validity in the terms proper to that design.
Where the four databases and the design vocabulary live
Recommended databases
- CINAHL
- MEDLINE / PubMed
- Embase
- PsycINFO
- The university library's A-Z database list
Search sequence
- 1.Check the library's filtered-versus-unfiltered guidance and pick four unfiltered databases before searching.
- 2.Run the same keyword set across all four so the search description on the slide is honest.
- 3.Screen each hit for whether it generated its own data, discarding reviews and syntheses at that step.
- 4.Look up the specific design vocabulary for each article before writing the methodology column.
- 5.Read the research ethics guidance against your chosen population, not against research in the abstract.
Sources for study design, trustworthiness and research ethics
These are authoritative starting points, not a ready-made bibliography. A qualified reviewer must confirm that each source fits the assignment and supports the claim beside which it is cited.
Nothing here is cleared for citation until you have read it.
- 01
Qualitative Study
StatPearls, NCBI Bookshelf, US National Library of Medicine · 2023
Qualitative traditions, sampling and the trustworthiness criteria. This is the source for naming a qualitative design specifically and for using credibility and dependability instead of borrowing quantitative language.
- 02
Epidemiology of Study Design
StatPearls, NCBI Bookshelf, US National Library of Medicine · 2023
Cohort, case-control, cross-sectional and experimental designs set out side by side, which is what turns 'quantitative' into a specific answer in the methodology column.
- 03
Human Subjects Research Design
StatPearls, NCBI Bookshelf, US National Library of Medicine · 2023
Where design choices and human-subjects protections meet. Use it to connect a study's methodology to the ethics note the matrix asks for in the same row.
- 04
Read the Belmont Report
Office for Human Research Protections, US Department of Health and Human Services · 1979
Respect for persons, beneficence and justice in the original text. The ethics bullet wants these applied to your clinical population, and citing the source document is stronger than citing a summary of it.
- 05
Using PubMed in Evidence-Based Practice
National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health · 2023
What a filter actually does to a result set. It is the reference behind the unfiltered-database reflection and behind knowing when a search has quietly excluded the primary studies you need.
Before the slides and the matrix are uploaded
Common mistakes
- Selecting systematic reviews because the required reading places them at the top of the evidence hierarchy, when the brief explicitly excludes them.
- Taking all four articles from one database and naming four databases on the slide anyway.
- Searching a filtered resource, which returns the synthesised evidence the assignment rules out and contradicts the unfiltered-database reflection at the same time.
- Omitting the research-ethics explanation entirely, because it sits inside a bullet about why the article was chosen.
- Writing the same ethics sentence in all four rows instead of relating it to each study's population.
- Labelling a study 'quantitative' and stopping, when the bullet says to be specific about the design.
- Applying internal-consistency and construct-validity language to a qualitative study instead of the trustworthiness criteria.
- Committing to a clinical issue before checking that four original studies exist for it, when the same issue carries through the whole course.
Submission checklist
- None of the four articles is a systematic review, meta-analysis or other synthesis.
- The four articles come from four genuinely different databases, and those databases are named on the slide.
- The databases searched are unfiltered resources, consistent with the reflection the preparation notes ask for.
- Each matrix row explains the research ethics relevant to that study's population, not research ethics in general.
- Each methodology is named by its specific design, not only as qualitative, quantitative or mixed-methods.
- Reliability and validity are described in the vocabulary that matches each design.
- All four citations appear in APA format on the slide and in the matrix.
- The presentation is 4 to 5 slides.
- The clinical issue chosen is one that can carry a PICOT question for the rest of the course.
Use this guide to plan and review your own work. Follow your institution's rules and read our academic-integrity policy.
Written by
Aaron Bishop
MA, Education
assignment interpretation and research-methods coaching across disciplines
Aaron leads the EssayCrackers editorial desk. He works on how assignment briefs are read — what a rubric is actually asking for, and where students most often answer a different question than the one set.
Reviewed by
Dr. Nathan Cole
PhD, Rhetoric & Composition
Argumentation and thesis development
Nathan teaches first-year composition and directs a university writing center. He reviews EssayCrackers guides for argumentative soundness and citation accuracy.