PICO Paper Assignment
Instructions for writing the PICO paper assignment

The PICO paper assignment will be your first nursing research experience. Students are instructed to find THREE nursing research article, no more than five (5) years old, that will support your topic.  The paper is intended to help you identify evidence based practice guidelines and utilize current nursing research. Select your nursing topic related to concepts studied this semester. The purpose of this critical thinking paper is to enable the student to develop an understanding of how to read a nursing research article, analyze what it says, and then incorporate the information into a two to three page paper (not including title page and reference page).

Papers will follow American Psychological Association (2010) (APA) 6^th ED format. All papers will be submitted through Turnitin.com. The original articles MUST be submitted with the paper. This is NOT an opinion paper. Papers will be written in third person.

Students are advised to start the paper early and go to the Student Support Office for assistance by the tutors. Papers should be 5-6 pages, excluding the title page and reference page.  This paper is intended to help you understand how to interpret existing research, with the plan to implement the knowledge into your nursing practice.   Articles must be from nursing research journal, and contain abstract, methods, sample, findings/results, and conclusion. Please refer to the rubric for point calculation.

The following logic analysis worksheet may be used to help you with your paper (Elder & Paul, 2012).

Analyzing the logic of an article

1. The main purpose of this article? (State as accurately as possible the author’s purpose for writing this article.)

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2. The key question that the author is addressing is (figure out what the key question on the author’s mind when writing this article):

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3. The most important information in this article is (figure out the facts, experience, data the author is using to support the conclusion):

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4. The main inference or conclusion in this article is (identify the key conclusions the author comes to or presents in this article):

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5. The key concept(s) we need to understand in this article is (are):
   1. By these concepts the author means (figure out the most important ideas you would have to understand in order to understand the authors’ line of reasoning):

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6. The main assumption underlying the author’s thinking is (what is the author taking for granted that may be questioned):

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7. If we take this line of reasoning seriously, the implications are (what consequences are likely to follow if people take the authors’ line of reasoning seriously):

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Or

8. If we fail to take this line of reasoning seriously, the implications are (what consequences are likely to follow if people ignore the author’s reasoning):

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9. The main point of view presented in this article is (what is the author looking at, and how is the author seeing it?

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