Enuval Research Primer
What Information Already Exists
Introduction
From Curiosity to Specificity
The first step in research is to refine a question. What are you interested in? What would you like to learn more about? For Enuval, we believe this question will be most interesting and compelling if it’s drawn from your own experience and driven by your own curiosity.
Once you have a question, it is essential to understand what knowledge already exists related to this question. Sometimes, someone has already done quality research that answers your question. Sometimes, the question is only partially answered.
To determine what knowledge already exists, it is important to do a “literature review” where you can read what is known already on the subject. While it is possible to type the question into a search engine or AI prompt, and return information, the best way to understand what knowledge already exists is to reach primary research in the form of research articles.
In this primer, we will guide you through refining your research question and finding one article related to your area of interest.
Process
Refine your question and find a research article that answers it
To begin, pick a question you are interested in. For example, a question might be something like “Am I likely to pass my scoliosis on to any future children?” or “Does a spine fusion result in later problems from the hardware?”.
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Next, try to make the question as specific as possible. For instance, if you are asking about scoliosis, make sure to specify what type of scoliosis (adolescent idiopathic, juvenile idiopathic, congenital, etc). If you are asking about spine fusion, specify the region of the fusion (e.g. cervical, thoracic or lumbar).
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After you have completed that process, Enuval has trained an AI ChatGPT prompt aid where you can type in your question. Click the button below to launch it.
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Please start by just typing hello or hi in the box, and it will tell you what to do. At the end of this process, it should return a prompt you can copy and insert into Pubmed, a searchable journal article repository. You will need to copy and paste the prompt into the following website: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.
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You should get a list of articles. Some of them will have a “free designation". Even if they are not free and behind a paywall, we can attempt to get them for you at Enuval. However, we want to make sure they are relevant to your question, so take a moment to read the abstract of the article which is the summary that appears when you click on the title.
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The main things to look for in the abstract are to make sure that the people being studied match what you are interested in. For instance, if you are interested in your risk of passing scoliosis onto your kids, does it say that the paper is focused on AIS if you have AIS? Is it in the same part of the world that you live in?
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Often, these abstracts are full of scientific verbiage that can be difficult to understand. Do your best to look up the words when possible, but we at Enuval can also help you understand the jargon to determine if the paper is related to your question.