Your goal is to summarize and CRITIQUE the findings from a peer-reviewed journal article related to physical activity, nutrition, dietary supplements or any other healthy lifestyle approach (e.g. smoking cessation, yoga, acupuncture, etc; NO animal studies and NO review papers). The article MUST be from a journal with NO or less than 1.0 Impact Factor. You must summarize the major themes of the article; if there are multiple themes, you may select one as your major focus. For example, if a study examines fruit and vegetable intake in Type I & Type II diabetes, your paper’s theme can focus only on fruit intake in Type II diabetes.
Papers must be written in complete sentences in essay format; lists, numbered answers, and incomplete sentences are not acceptable. Your paper must summarize and CRITIQUE the article; questions are included under each heading below as a guide. Be specific when possible (“14,341 participants from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey” vs “a lot of people”).
I. Introduction/Background
What is the topic of the article? What disease (or sport performance outcome) is being discussed? What is known and what is unknown about the research topic? What general outcomes are being examined (morbidity, mortality, etc.)? What are the characteristics of the sample being considered (elderly, children, females, transplant recipients, smokers)?
II. Hypothesis/Relationships being examined
What are the specific predictor variables (vitamin D, number of children, socioeconomic status, race, etc.)? What are the specific outcome variables (hospital visits, number of deaths in a year, cost of treatment, serum biomarkers, BMI, etc.)? Are there any covariates worth mentioning that are being controlled for (age, gender, etc.)? What is the intervention?
III. Methods & Materials
What are the main outcomes and how are they measured? What is the design of the study (cross-sectional, cohort, etc.)? What are the inclusion/exclusion criteria? What time period is the data being collected from? How were participants recruited? What statistical analyses were used?
IV. Results
How many participants were included in the final analysis? What are their demographic characteristics? Which of the predictors were significantly associated with which outcome? Which associations were not significant? Include specific statistics in your summary when reporting a finding. For example, if you say there was a greater risk in CHD in smokers, you should also write (RR = 2.12, 95% CI = 1.05 – 3.43).
V. Discussion/Conclusion
What are the major conclusions of the study? What are the implications of the results? Were the results expected? Were there any novel findings? Was a mechanism provided that explains the findings? Were the findings similar or different from others studies?
VI. Limitations
What were the limitations of the study? Was there something about the inclusion/exclusion criteria that may have limited the generalizability of the findings? Are the methods and measures sound? Do the measures have any inherent limitations? How accurate and reliable were the tools used to measure the predictors and outcomes? Was any predictor or outcome missed? What could have been done differently? What else could have realistically been done? What should a future study consider doing?
VII. If you had been one of the reviewers of the article, what CRITIQUE would you have provided? What grade would you have given to the article: (a) acceptable, (b) acceptable with minor changes, (c) acceptable with major changes, and (d) non-acceptable. Provide the rational for your grade.
