Walden Library Database: Research on Inpatient Suicide and Support

This discussion board post evaluates the use of Google Scholar for researching the impact of inpatient suicide on psychiatric nurses. The student highlights the database's ease of use and straightforward referencing features, which simplifies the research process. Challenges included the absence of labeled buttons for specific functions, potentially hindering user experience. The student identifies the large sample size and accessible language as strengths of the chosen article, while noting a potential bias due to the limited scope focusing only on psychiatric nurses. The post recommends the database to colleagues, emphasizing its convenience and simplicity in retrieving and citing journals. The analysis provides valuable insights into the research process, highlighting both the strengths and weaknesses of the database and the research article's methodology.

Running Head: RESEARCH BASICS 1
RESEARCH BASICS
Student Name
Institution Affiliation
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RESEARCH BASICS 2
The database which I used to carry out research on my topic “The impact of inpatient
suicide on psychiatric nurses and their need for support” was the Google Scholar. There were
many motives which drew my interest to utilize this database in my research. The main one was
the ease of navigation in the process of finding the correct information I purposed to obtain
(Shultz, 2007). I just needed to search the keywords from my research topic and a huge number
of related articles would be displayed for me to make a comparison and choose the right journal
which I felt to have the right information I needed.
Secondly, according to the rules of formal writing, any material used in a research calls for
referencing and this database clearly made the process easy and straightforward. This is through
the presence of a button which displayed the article in all the five formatting styles (APA, MLA,
Harvard, Chicago & Vancouver) to allow the research directly copy without having to do it
himself (Shultz, 2007).
(Shultz, 2007).

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The main challenge I encountered in this database was the absence of labeled buttons which
could enable me to find what I needed directly. For instance, in my attempt to know how I could
cite the references, I have to do trial and error until I came to click one of the buttons which
displayed the cited form (Shultz, 2007). This can be seen as a lack of clarity in the database and
may easily discourage people from using it. However, despite this weakness, this database to me
remains the best considering its simplicity as far as retrieving the journals is concerned. In
addition to simplicity, it is also convenient when it comes to citing the journal is concerned
because the researcher is only required to copy the citation as per the research specifications. I
would, therefore, recommend the database to my colleagues.
In my research article “The impact of inpatient suicide on psychiatric nurses and their need for
support”, I identified some strengths as well as weaknesses. The main strength was its utilization
of large sample size (531 nurses). This is in consideration of the fact that large sample sizes
make the research stronger and minimizes the chances of being biased. Secondly, despite this
article being related to medical profession where the language used is hard to understand, the
article used simpler language in order to widen its scope of readers (Takahashi, Chida,
Nakamura, Akasaka, Yagi, Koeda & Sakai, 2011).
This article has limited its scope to psychiatric nurses which in a way increases its chances of
being biased in a different way. This is in consideration of the fact that there are many
professionals dealing with inpatient suicide and their engagement as well might have positively
contributed to the research (Takahashi et al, 2011). For instance, Guidance and counseling
professionals engage with the inpatient suicide at the root level and might be the people affected
by the experiences most compared to psychiatric nurses who interact with those patients after

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they have gone through counselors. Therefore, a blind eye on guidance and counseling
professionals in this article is a source of bias to the research.
References
Shultz, M. (2007). Comparing test searches in PubMed and Google Scholar. Journal of the
Medical Library Association: JMLA, 95(4), 442.
Takahashi, C., Chida, F., Nakamura, H., Akasaka, H., Yagi, J., Koeda, A., ... & Sakai, A. (2011).
The impact of inpatient suicide on psychiatric nurses and their need for support. BMC
Psychiatry, 11(1), 38.