DNP 801 Topic 4: empirical research identification

The word empirical is doing precise work here and the checklist exists because students routinely submit articles that are scholarly but not empirical. An empirical study reports original data the authors themselves collected or analysed: it has a stated research question or hypothesis, a described method covering sample, setting and procedure, results presented as findings rather than as argument, and a discussion interpreting those findings. That definition rules out a great deal that looks respectable — systematic reviews and meta-analyses synthesise other people's data rather than reporting their own, and while they sit high in an evidence hierarchy they are not empirical studies for this assignment. It also rules out theoretical papers, editorials, quality improvement reports with no research design, clinical practice guidelines and textbook chapters. Check each candidate against the checklist item by item before committing to it, because discovering at the chart stage that an article has no method section costs the whole search again.

The three articles must relate to your PICOT question, and relate is worth interpreting properly: an article is related if it addresses your population, your intervention or your outcome, and the strongest set covers different elements rather than three studies of the same thing. Then the chart, which is where the assignment's purpose shows. Charting forces you to state each study's design, sample, setting, intervention, measures and findings in the same columns, and the value is comparative — laid out side by side, you can see that two studies used incompatible outcome measures, or that all three were conducted in a setting unlike yours, which is a finding about your evidence base rather than about any single paper. Say what the chart revealed rather than only completing it. That observation is what carries into the annotated bibliography and the evaluation paper in later topics, and it is what the sequence is building toward.