EAP 11 Leading to Nursing: Research Methods and Information Literacy

This essay examines the importance of information literacy in nursing practice, particularly for international students. It highlights the need for evaluation-based practice to ensure accurate patient care and avoid malpractices. The essay compares Google Scholar and YouTube as research methods, emphasizing the strengths and weaknesses of each. Google Scholar is lauded for its access to academic journals and articles, while YouTube offers video-based learning. The essay concludes that Google Scholar is more suitable for academic research due to its peer-reviewed content and efficiency in note-taking. Desklib provides access to similar essays and study resources for students.

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EAP 11 leading to nursing
According to Forser (2012, p.1239), Information literacy is the ability to know the correct
information, having the knowledge to identify and evaluate any situation. For nurses to give
correct information about the patient, evaluation based practice should be used. This evaluation
based practice helps nurses to make decisions on patient’s sicknesses not only based on the
available information but also their situation, characteristics and preferences. Without the
information literacy, the evaluation based practice cannot work in the nursing practice.
Information literacy helps the nurses to avoid malpractices which can put the patient’s life at
risk. It also helps them in understanding evaluation based practices and clinical procedures which
helps one to make a correct diagnosis for the disease hence giving correct medication. For
example, in a situation where a nurse lacks good medication skills which are attained through
evaluation based practice he or she may end up making wrong decisions which can lead to more
serious problems. For the international students, information literacy is important because it
helps them adjust to the country’s system and work efficiently. This is whereby if the country
has a system documentation in terms of writing skills for the international students.
Information is an entity that gives answers to some questions or solves uncertainties. In
order to come up with those answers, there are various methods used by international students in
searching. One of these methods is google scholar. This method was introduced some years ago
as a method of examining and searching for information. According to Aalst (2010, p. 394),
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web research engine which helps learners look for a wide
range of academic literature and information. This method includes academic journals, books
and other scholarly literature from all areas of research. Scholars can get information from a

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wide range of article since google draws information from various sites like journal publishers
and professional societies. This method gives unique solutions from other forms of searching for
information. Although google scholar provides a wide variety of article, there are some of the
disadvantages associated with this method. One of these is that google scholar does not provide a
notice of when its material is updated.
Google scholar is an important web page research which in terms of writing skills for
international students helps them retrieve information for their assignments and academic
writings. This is because while searching, this would as well involve writing down some of the
important points necessary for the assignment (Aalst 2010, p. 392). It also provides a wide
variety of articles which are related to what they are searching which enables them to provide
strong answers to the questions hence improving the writing skills. Google scholar is faster and
easy to use. This helps the international students improve on their speed when writing and also
save the articles and citations for future use (Forser 2012, 1239). This helps in situations where
the student have been told to redo the work. These articles would, therefore, assist them from
providing different answers from the previous one which amounts to double work. According to
(Aalst 2010, p. 389), Google Scholar is the best tool for searching information which any
international student aspiring to improve on his or her writing skills should use.
Another approach that can be used by learners to search for information is YouTube.
According to Duncan, Yarwood-Ross & Haigh (2013, p. 1583), YouTube is a video sharing
platform where people can upload and watch videos. These video services can be accessed
through laptops, tablets and also mobile phones. Users can also like, share and comment on those
videos. For one to watch videos, he or she should be in a place where there is access to the

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internet. YouTube can be used for both entertainment and academic purposes. For example,
Students use YouTube to search for videos which are related to their field of study and answer
the questions provided. Since this method provides other platforms which are not educational,
children below the age of 18 should not be allowed to use YouTube. This is because this thing
can bring about immoral behaviours to the children or cyberbullying.
This method of information research is important for international students because it
helps them improve their writing skills. This is because YouTube gives the learners ability to
improve on their note-taking skills by viewing, rewinding and replaying the videos until they get
the key points for their questions (Duncan, Yarwood-Ross & Haigh 2013, p. 1578). These videos
also assist the international students to formulate and write down their own questions based on
those videos which help them improve their writing skills and also become more creative.
Youtube needs much concentration to the videos in order to get the important points for the
questions. This would, therefore, need the student to only write down the relevant information
and ignore which is not necessary. This, in turn, improves the writing skills of the international
students since watching videos goes in hand with writing especially when watching them for
academic purposes.
Though the two methods provide the basis for searching information, google scholar is
the most suitable for this process. This is because google scholar provides a wide range of
academic journals and articles which are peer reviewed whereas YouTube only provides videos
which sometimes does not contain information necessary for educational purposes. For example,
a student may find an information from the google scholar which is more retrieved whereas this
may be confusing in YouTube because one receives both necessary and unnecessary

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information. Also, it is easy to take notes from the google scholar, unlike YouTube where some
videos are fast hence making the learners leave some important notes. For the international
students, these reviewed articles provided by google scholar helps them in improving their
writing skills (Wang & Howard 2012, p. 94). This is because by looking at this article they end
up writing their own following the same structure hence improving on their writing skills. Unlike
YouTube, google scholar is fast and saves time. This is because it provides reviewed information
in which the students do not keep on reading in order to understand the concepts like in YouTube
where the researcher has to review and replay videos to get the key information.

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References
Aalst, J 2010, Using Google Scholar to Estimate the Impact of Journal Articles in Education,
Educational Researcher, Vol. 39, no 5, pp. 387-400.
Duncan, I., Yarwood-Ross, L & Haigh, C 2013, YouTube as a source of clinical skills education,
Nurse Education Today, vol. 33, no.2013, pp.1576–1580
Forser, M 2012, A phenomenographic Investigations into Information Literacy in Nursing
Practice-Preliminary Findings and methodical Issues, Nurse education today, vol. 33 no. 2013,
pp. 1237-1241.
Wang, J & Howard, P 2012, Google Scholar Usage: An Academic Library's Experience, Journal
of Web Librarianship, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 94-108, DOI: 10.1080/19322909.2012.672067