The critical review: a new type of paper
Francisco Pedro García Fernández, Pedro Luis Pancorbo Hidalgo, María del Carmen Rodríguez Torres

SUMMARY

  The spectacular increase in the quantity of circulating scientific information, the difficulties for the access to the same one, problems of understanding and critical analysis of the scientific information and shortage of time for reading of articles is hindering the diffusion of the nursing scientific knowledge. The appearance of a new type of scientific article, the Critical Review (CR), also denominated Structured and Commented Summary, would contribute to solve some of these problems. The author of a CR select excellent research papers carried out in any place of the world, overcome the idiomatic barriers and analyze in a critical way the information putting it to disposition for the use of clinical nurses in a summarized way. In this article we seek to give the reader the necessary help to elaborate a CR trying to define the characteristics that should gather this type of scientific article, so the Critical Comment (with a minimun of quality elements) as the structure of the Informative Summary (to be included in databases).

  The CR is composed for preliminary part (with the title, the informative summary, key words, the question type Evidence-based nursing (EBN) and the selection of the article), a structured summary (that is composed for the design of the study, place, aims, methods, main results and conclusions) and the critical comment (introduction to the problem, validity of the study, relevance of the work and closing with answer to the EBN question).

KEY WORDS

Evidence, Evidence-based nursing, critical review, critical commentary, scientific article.

Vol. 15 nº3-2004