The Use of Firsthand Sources of Information Discussion

colleague’s posting: Unlike firsthand research, which is research you have conducted yourself including interviews, experiments, surveys, or personal experience and anecdotes that you can derive knowledge from; the use of secondhand research requires sourcing of valid and scholarly information to help reinforce your message and convey a well-founded idea/notion (PU, 2020). However, that poses the question of credibility, reliability, accuracy, and trustworthiness of the source that you utilize for your research papers. In order to do this, it is important to ensure that you can validate the credibility of the source, including who wrote it, was it peer-reviewed, is the source in which it was published credible, how well does it apply to your research and your target audience and if found inline, how is it reviewed for validity. The Walden University library offers a database that provides proven scholarly sources, validating the findings prior to your search. However, other good resources are also available to use for research, among them is Google Scholar.

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Upon my initial search, the Walden library database only provided one matching source. This is because I was specifically searching for article from 2015 to 2021, specifying that I only wanted Full text and Peer reviewed scholarly journals. The initial post was also limited by the specific phrase used in the search bar: “Misdiagnosis in the ER”. This might be considered a problem, but when broadening my search, by using a less specific search, “Misdiagnosis errors” with the same parameters, the search returned 313 results. I later entered a “Emergency Room or Emergency Department” into the second search line and narrowed the results down to just 11. Even after, changing the wording in the search to “Diagnosis Errors” with all other parameters of the search being the same, the results included 949 sources. This shows that the choice of words, although very similar, has a significant impact on the outcome of your search results.

In Google Scholar, a search with the phrase “misdiagnosis errors in the emergency department” with the date range specified to 2016-2021, returned a total of 9720 results. The page, which sources from what seems to be a broader database is recognized as a reliable source because they take your search across many disciplines and sources that include articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other web sites focusing solely on credible, scholarly material. The sources, although they include more than just full text articles, provides a good resource to find additional sources, when the library doesn’t provide enough usable sources, especially when the research is on a very specific topic, such as this. Much like the library, Google is known for the use of specific words to pinpoint what you are searching for and ensure that the results are the most relevant.