Question

Chronic Pain and Sleep - United States - for OT thesis

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Hi there, 
I was wondering if you had any advice on how to find articles on chronic pain and sleep, but focusing on the work done in the United States rather than the UK, Austria, etc.? 
Please let me know. I appreciate your help. 

Answered By: Linda Kern
Last Updated: Feb 05, 2018     Views: 16

We've pulled together a special list of places to research Dr. Underwood's research streams. It's located on the EBP page to the OT research guide. Sleep is one of her topics.

Start with PsycINFO, the first in the list. There's no geography limiter in this database, and adding United States to the search terms won't help. That's because the abstract or another primary field would have to include "United States", and that's not common. I searched "chronic pain" AND sleep, limited to articles and the last 5 years, and came up with 307 results. You'll probably want to add another search term to narrow the results further.

To review the articles to determine where the research was done, you'll want to first point to the preview icon to the right of the title (magnifying glass and page). If it doesn't give you any clues as to the location, click on the article title. If all of the authors are located in the US, you're almost assured that the research was done in the US. If the authors are located at institutions in the US and another country, you'll have to review the full text. For example, an article I found listed two lead authors in Australia and a few more in the US. However the Method section of the study described the participants as "presenting for treatment at a multidisciplinary tertiary pediatric pain clinic in the United States". Sometimes the articles just don't say where the research was done. In that case, I would assume that authors working at institutions located outside of the US probably did the research outside of the US.

Next I searched the Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection, second on the list for Dr. Underwood's students. This much smaller database had 60 results.

I followed the same process through the rest of the databases. The Psychology Journals database (120 results) allows you to limit by location, but it will only pick up articles that are coded with the location. Most aren't coded, which means that the best course of action is to search through the relevant articles.

Don't make your decision based on the country of publication either. Some of the more prominent publishers of American research are located the The Netherlands and the UK.

 

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