Health Sciences Overview: Writing Assignments by Class

As you begin learning to write professional papers, you will find the hardest part is finding "good" articles.  Professional APA papers are different than anything you have written before.  You are no longer repeating information you found or writing a paper that "says what you want to say."  Now you will be telling the reader about an empirical study/original research [evidence] and how the results of that study impact your practice.

You need to understand what type of articles will best suit your research needs:

• Studies provide information about new discoveries in the field
• Continuing Education/Text sources are written by someone who is an expert in the field.  Whether by their own research or years of experience, these source generally share information compiled from many different sources. You need to be care when using this type of article to avoid indirect citations.
• Commentary articles are merely someone's opinion.  While that someone may be an expert, be sure you know if they are before using information from them.
• Statistics provide information from counting, surveys, or studies.  Be sure you are getting your statistic directly from the person or organization who actually gathered the statistic.  You cannot use a stat quoted in an article by someone else.

When searching for your articles, do not use too many words or try to find an article that uses the exact words of your topic.  If you have trouble finding article that mention your topic specifically, think bigger.  Instead of breast cancer, perhaps you should try cancer.  Instead of COVID, perhaps you should try infectious diseases.

While most assignments do not require the article to be published in America, you still need to make sure that the lessons learned in the study are applicable to American health care.  For example, an article that mentions problems caused by the abject poverty of a third world country, might not be something that American health workers--even those working in poor neighborhoods--would face.