I just wanted to add, I don’t really understand how Reddit works, but it says I have a “77% upvote rate” - why would someone downvote a post where someone is asking for help on how to conduct good research?
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I’m quite embarrassed to be writing this… But how do you conduct research? I have a philosophy degree and a psychology masters, I’m studying to be a naturopath at the moment (yes yes, not very scientific, I know but I love it!)
I’m not bad at research because I’m studying naturopathy btw, I was also bad at research when I studied psychology, lol. I just don’t get how people don’t just feel utterly lost when they go to PubMed, type in their terms and get presented with thousands of papers. How on earth do you know where to even start?
I just have never been able to get the hang of how to conduct good research. I can read a paper, and evaluate it fairly well (I think) but how do I actually get hold of the papers in the first place? There must be some sort of system to it I’m missing?
We were taught the CAT technique (critical appraisal of a topic) during my Master degree. It’s actually very useful and has techniques to 1) search for articles 2) assess the quality of the paper and its interventions/method and 3) apply the findings to your specific situation (e.g. implementing a health-intervention at the company you work at).
I mostly used my university’s own manual but you should be able to find comprehensive guides and papers via google and pubmed
You may want to narrow down your search terms, I know PubMed recommends PICO (problem, intervention, comparison, outcome) for search terms, and from there you can use filters to further narrow it down.
Find people who do good research and then look at the papers they mention
people like Rhonda Patrick or Andrew Huberman or Gregory Geiger etc, the ones who actually mention real research and foot note it.
I am far from a vegan but Dr Geiger does lots of interesting vids on nutrition and he always mentions the specific paper he is talking about and its easy to look them up. Same with Rhonda.
Dr Brad Stanfield on YT always has links to the papers he talks about.