Evidence of the usefulness of VEXUS score in the diagnosis and treatment of the syndrome cardiorenal: a narrative review

Narrative Reviews: Flexible, Rigorous, and Practical.

BackgroundSystematic reviews may provide less biased evidence than narrative reviews because they observe a strict methodology, similarly to primary studies. Hence, for clinical research questions, systematic reviews should be the study design of choice. It would be important to evaluate the prevalence and characteristics of narrative and systematic reviews published in prominent medical journals. Researchers and clinicians give great value to articles published in such scientific journals. This study sought to evaluate the prevalence and characteristics of narrative and systematic reviews in the five highest-ranked general medical journals and investigate the associations among type of review, number of citations, and impact factor (IF).MethodsWe surveyed the five highest-ranked medical journals (The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, The Journal of the American Medical Association, The BMJ, and Annals of Internal Medicine) for narrative and systematic reviews published between June 2015 and June 2016. We independently selected and extracted the data from the reviews by strictly following the pre-determined eligibility criteria (Systematic and narrative reviews that focused on the management of diseases). We conducted regression analyses to investigate the associations among review type, number of citations, and IF. We also descriptively reported narrative reviews containing some methodology that might be reproducible.ResultsTwo hundred seventy-five reviews were included: 75 (27%) systematic; 126 (46%) narrative with some methodology reported, and 74 (27%) narrative reviews. In comparison to systematic reviews, narrative reviews were more frequently published in journals with higher IF (risk ratio [RR] = 1.114 (95% CI 1.080 to 1.149). Systematic reviews received more citations than narrative reviews (group formed by narrative and narrative with some methodology reported (RR = 0.985 95% CI 0.978 to 0.991).ConclusionsNon-systematic evidence is the most prevalent type of evidence in reviews published in the five highest-ranked general medical journals. Narrative reviews were more frequently published in journals with higher IF. We recommend that journals limit their space for narrative information, and to address clinical research questions, these journals consider publishing systematic evidence exclusively.

So You Want to Write a Narrative Review Article?

Facilitating the planning and evaluation of narrative intervention reviews: Systematic Transparency Assessment in Intervention Reviews (STAIR)

Squash injury countermeasures: A review of the literature

Editorial

Munchausen's Syndrome

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of the neutrality literature and suggests areas ripe for future research. Design/methodology/approach – The authors reviewed journal articles on the topic of neutrality in mediation, which included theoretical viewpoints and empirical research on practicing mediators’ understanding of neutrality. Findings – The review of literature revealed that party perspectives are largely missing from current neutrality literature. Two potential concepts emerged from the authors' review of literature that could potentially influence parties’ attributions of mediator neutrality: symmetry and transparency. Symmetry refers to the equal treatment of parties, whereas transparency refers to providing an explanation of past or future behavior. Research on whether symmetry and transparency are key influences on party assessment of mediator neutrality could make a significant contribution to the field. Research limitations/implications – The authors call on researchers with diverse methodological perspectives to examine, from the party’s perspective, important questions regarding the meaning of neutrality, mediator strategies to successfully enact neutrality and the impact of neutrality on mediation outcomes. Originality/value – Neutrality is arguably one of the most important concepts to the mediation field. Despite its significance to the field, only limited research has been conducted to better understand how neutrality is enacted in practice. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the literature and provides a launching point for future research.

Research background: Price stability plays a crucial role in ensuring stabilities in the financial markets as well as the real sector. Despite this, questions are still raised, querying if it is either inflation, inflation uncertainty or a combination of both, which affects economic growth? The results obtained, both theoretically and empirically, differ. This paper seeks to revisit and provide both the theoretical and empirical review of literature on the inflation, inflation uncertainty and economic growth nexus. Purpose: The focus of the paper is centred on the review of theoretical literature, investigating if the differences in findings are attributed to differences in the channels through which inflation and inflation uncertainty is passed over to economic growth; as well as a review of empirical literature, investigating if the source of differences in the findings lies in the separate or joint estimation of inflation and inflation uncertainty on economic growth. Research methodology: This paper presents an extensive review of scholarly studies on the inflation, inflation uncertainty and economic growth nexus based on their results. The paper analysed, synthesised and critically evaluated previous studies on the inflation, inflation uncertainty and economic growth nexus on both the theoretical and empirical fronts. Results: In theoretical literature, the study found that the impact of inflation and inflation uncertainty is passed over to economic growth mainly through two channels, which are the price-informative role and the investment spending channel. From the empirical front, studies which separately estimated the role of either inflation or inflation uncertainty on economic growth found mixed results. Studies which estimated the joint impact of both variables on economic growth, arrived at a conclusion that inflation harms economic growth while the literature still remains inconclusive on inflation uncertainty. Novelty: The study provides an insight into the inflation, inflation uncertainty and economic growth nexus based on a detailed review of literature on the subject based on various transmission channels. Further, it enriches the literature through exploring possible reasons behind the lack of consensus on the impact of inflation and inflation uncertainty on economic growth.

Historical Studies.- Between War Profits and War Costs Krupp in the First World War.- Indicators of Real Effective Exchange Rates of Major Trading Nations from 1922 to 1937.- Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht and the Reparation Payments (1924-1930).- Cartels as a Form of Concentration in Industry: The Example of the International Dyestuffs Cartel from 1927 to 1939.- Reviews of Literature.- A Review of the New Literature on Business History.- A Review of the New Literature on Banking History.- Reports on Conferences.- Cooperation in the Form of Banking Consortia.- Socialized Companies - Yesterday - Today - Tomorrow.- Trends in the Savings Banks' Deposits-Taking Business.- The Private Customer.

Laparoscopic Hysterectomy in Case of Uteri Weighing ≥1 Kilogram: A Series of 71 Cases and Review of the Literature

Slant, Style, and Synthesis: 3 Keys to a Strong Literature Review

Biomedical and public health reviews and meta-analyses in Ethiopia had poor methodological quality: overview of evidence from 1970 to 2018

The Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans (Guidelines) advises older adults to be as active as possible. Yet, despite the well documented benefits of physical activity just 12.8% of those ages 65 and older meet the Guidelines. To address this, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) developed a Midcourse Report focused on effective strategies to improve older adult physical activity behaviors. The first step in this process was a systematic literature review. A literature review team was contracted to examine the evidence on key settings and effective behavioral intervention strategies, as well as effective policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) approaches, to improve physical activity among older adults. The PSE search employed an equity-centered framework adapted to researching PSE approaches for improving physical activity outcomes in older adults. Sixteen thousand eight hundred and eighty-three titles and abstracts were screened, and 734 full articles were reviewed for inclusion. Of those, 64 original research articles were included for the final review to answer two questions, one (plus 5 sub-questions) focused on Settings/Strategies literature (45 studies) and one (plus 2 sub-questions) focused on PSE literature (19 studies). The literature review process identified key settings and evidence-based strategies to support older adults in becoming more physically active, and provides a foundation for the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans Midcourse Report: Implementation Strategies for Older Adults. More research is needed to address how factors related to equity and psychosocial constructs influence physical activity behaviors among older adults.

One size does not fit all for literature reviews within nursing publications. The lengths of literature reviews in articles differ greatly between different types of nursing journals. This experienced author and journal reviewer describes three factors that authors and editorial board members can use to determine the target length for a literature review. Nurses are often scared away from publishing by the thought of writing a literature review. Typically, these nurses suffer from memories of writing exhaustive and exhausting reviews of the literature for school papers. They often reconsider publishing their work when they discover that many journals do not require a long literature review and that journal editors who expect literature reviews want only references cited that are directly related to the topic under discussion (Johnson, 1991). Editorial board members and journal reviewers often disagree on the extent of literature review and often make opposite recommendations to the author. One reviewer might say “expand this section” while another says “summarize and shorten this section” when referring to the literature review. Both nursing authors and reviewers need to identify the appropriate length of the literature review for the journal for which they are writing or reviewing. The literature review intended for a graduate thesis is only one type of literature review. It is usually longer and more extensive than those used in nursing publications. The most common types of literature reviews range from a few sentences to multiple paragraphs in published nursing articles. The length of the literature review is based on three factors: the idea, audience, and type of journal (See Figure 1). The first step in writing a manuscript is finding a single idea that engages you and will be of interest to a particular group of readers. If you don't narrow your idea to a single slant, you are likely to wander around in the article and in the literature review, making both longer and weaker than intended. When you narrow the slant of the article, you also narrow the focus of the literature review. The idea itself has a lot to do with the length of the literature review. For example, an article that is a review article on the use of music therapy for cardiac patients is likely to be fairly long, because the main idea is to review, compare, and contrast the current studies and literature. Another article on techniques for using music therapy for pediatric cardiac patients might be fairly short, because there is less literature on this narrow topic and the focus of the article is on advice for the reader. If your idea is a fairly broad one, do a literature search to organize your thoughts, but do not write the literature review yet. Instead, develop your research questions or clinical point to a new slant not yet covered in the literature, focus on the key references for the specific slant, then summarize the points as you write the literature review. If you have a complex idea covering many concepts with a large research base, your literature review needs to be longer than if you have a well targeted slant on a new idea. It is because of this that articles in the same journal and for the same audience still differ slightly from each other in the length of their literature sections. Tailor the length of your review to the slant of your article. Once you have an idea for an article, you need to identify the audience for whom you are writing. The composition of the audience determines the type of journal best suited to that audience. And, the audience's viewpoint and interest in past studies and theory suggests the length of the literature review. Busy clinical nurses who like shorter, to-the-point articles would like to know the basics of how the idea fits in with nursing theory, while researchers and academicians want to know details on the literature basis for the study or information. The need to support ideas with citations from the literature differs depending upon the type of journal for which you are writing. The way to find which journal best fits your idea and audience is to go through the journals by hand to search for articles that are similar in topic and style to the one you want to write. Isolating the most fitting journal for your piece determines if a review of the literature is necessary and how extensive and intensive that review usually is for that journal. Most journals use one of three literature search types. Study the author guidelines for the journal where you want to submit your manuscript, because editors often describe the length of literature search to use. Notice that editors of general practice journals usually do not want a separate literature review section or citations. Rather than have a separate review section, a few sentences are often used within the paper to refer to past work. While editors of specialty or clinical journals may or may not want a formal literature review, they usually want to see relevant ideas from selected authors cited. They expect a reference list of moderate length including between five and ten citations. For non-research articles in these journals, the literature summary is often one to five paragraphs in length. However, research articles in these specialty journals may have longer literature reviews. Editors of research or scholarly journals typically require a formal literature review and an extensive reference list that includes approximately ten to 30 citations. The literature review is often five to 15 paragraphs long, but is not as long as that in most school thesis projects. In the first example of a general practice journal, ideas are presented without being attributed to any one author. While, in the second example of a specialty journal, only one set of authors is specifically cited. Yet, in the third example for a scholarly journal, a string of authors are cited who share similar ideas related to peer mentoring. The best guide for determining when to use a literature review and how long to make it is to peruse articles of a similar nature in the chosen journal. Articles with a similar style in the target journal have the same idea, audience, and journal, so they are most likely to reflect the target length for your own literature search. By analyzing these three factors, authors can develop a goal for the length of their literature searches and the number of citations to use, and editorial board members can give consistent advice on manuscript reviews. At the same time, don't take the review lightly. Shorter is not necessarily easier. A well-organized, selective, and succinct literature review is not easy to write. Don't be scared off from publishing by the idea of writing a literature review for your manuscript. You no longer have to include every article you read (in fact you should not) and you don't need to convince the teacher you read everything on the subject. In the publication process, writing the literature review helps you identify the uniqueness of your idea and how it fits into the literature and updates the reader on the literature on which you have based your idea or research. The literature review should not overshadow the author's advice, research, or information; instead, it should strengthen it. Kathleen T. Heinrich PhD, RN is an associate professor at the University of Hartford in West Hartford, CT. In addition to presenting “Writing for Publication” workshops to nursing groups around the country, Dr. Heinrich is a reviewer for Nurse Educator and the Journal of Family Nursing. You may contact her at 860-768-4213).