PSYCH 599 Week 3 Finding and Evaluating Scholarly Sources Example

Do Text Reminders Help Patients Take Their Medicines? Searching for and Judging the Evidence

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PSYCH/599: Foundations of Graduate Study in Psychology

Week 3 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The student, pharmacy chain and vendor brochure are composites written for a model paper; the studies and reports evaluated come from the sources listed.

Graduate work in psychology rests on evidence, and evidence varies widely in quality. This paper describes how I searched for research on a practical question from my workplace and how I judged the sources I found. It shows the difference between a source that looks authoritative and one that is.

The Question

My company, which runs eleven community pharmacies in Albuquerque, is considering a paid service that sends patients text-message reminders to take their medicines and pick up refills. The vendor promises that adherence will "jump by forty percent." Before the company spends money, I wanted to know what research shows. I framed the question in a form I could search: among adults taking medicines for chronic conditions, do text reminders improve adherence compared with usual care, and by how much?

The Search

I searched three databases through the university library: PsycINFO for psychological research, PubMed for medical research and CINAHL for nursing and allied health. My search string joined three blocks with AND, each block a set of OR terms: one for the technology ("text messag*," "SMS," "mobile phone"), one for the behavior ("adherence," "compliance") and one for the treatment ("medication," "drug therapy"). Filters kept English-language, peer-reviewed work published since 2010. PubMed returned 412 results, PsycINFO 96 and CINAHL 158, with much overlap. I read titles and abstracts, set aside studies of children and of reminders for appointments rather than medicines and kept the most relevant studies for full reading, alongside the vendor's brochure and a news story my director forwarded.

Criteria for Judging Sources

I evaluated each source on five criteria: who produced it and whether they had a stake in the result; whether it went through genuine peer review; the study design and sample; how adherence was measured; and how current and relevant it was to adults in community pharmacies.

Source One: The Vendor Brochure

The brochure claims a forty percent improvement but cites only "internal data" and two testimonials from pharmacy owners. The vendor profits from sales, the data cannot be checked and "adherence" is not defined. I ranked it lowest. It is useful only as a statement of what the vendor claims.

Source Two: A News Story

The news story reported a university study under the headline "Texts Make Patients Take Their Pills." Tracing the story back, I found it was based on a university press release that described a small trial. Sumner et al. (2014) compared health-related press releases from leading British universities with the original studies and the news stories that followed. Press releases often exaggerated the findings, for instance by implying that correlation showed causation or by applying animal results to humans, and news stories built on exaggerated press releases were more likely to repeat those exaggerations. That finding convinced me to read the original study rather than the coverage.

Source Three: A Suspicious Journal Article

One article reported a seventy percent improvement in adherence from texting in a sample of thirty patients. The journal's website promised peer review within seventy-two hours for a fee and listed an editorial board whose members I could not verify. Beall (2012), a university librarian who tracked such outlets, warned that a growing number of publishers were exploiting the author-pays model of open access: they collect fees, promise rapid acceptance, list editors who never agreed to serve and perform little or no real review. The journal showed several of those signs, so I excluded the article.

A journal that promises peer review in seventy-two hours is telling you something, just not about the study.

Source Four: The Pooled Analysis

The strongest source was a meta-analysis by Thakkar et al. (2016), who combined sixteen randomized clinical trials of mobile phone text messaging for medication adherence in chronic disease, involving more than five thousand patients. Text messaging roughly doubled the odds of adherence compared with usual care. Expressed differently, if adherence were fifty percent without texts, it would rise to about sixty-eight percent with them. The authors cautioned, however, that most trials were short, that many measured adherence by patient self-report and that the effect might be smaller with objective measures such as pharmacy refill records.

This source ranks highest because it pools randomized trials, reports its methods transparently and appeared in a respected peer-reviewed journal. Its limits matter for my question, though: self-report can inflate adherence, and trials may have included more motivated patients than my pharmacies serve.

Why Replication Shapes My Confidence

A broader lesson from psychology tempered my reading of single studies. In a project organized by the Open Science Collaboration (2015), teams repeated one hundred studies published in three leading psychology journals. Fewer than half of the replications produced statistically significant results, and effect sizes were on average about half as large as in the originals. A single dramatic result, like the seventy percent claim, deserves caution even when published. A pooled analysis of many trials offers more confidence because it does not depend on one sample.

Measuring the Outcome Matters

One detail kept returning as I read: how each study measured adherence. Self-report asks patients how often they missed doses, which is cheap but tends to overstate adherence, since people forget lapses and want to look responsible. Pill counts and electronic caps that record each opening are more objective but can change behavior simply because patients know they are monitored. Pharmacy refill records, which show whether a patient picked up enough medication to cover the days in a period, are objective and already exist in my company's system, though they show possession rather than swallowing. When I sorted the trials by measure, those using refill or electronic data tended to report smaller effects than those using self-report. That pattern did not appear in the vendor brochure, which never said how adherence was measured. Learning to ask how an outcome was measured may be the most useful habit this search taught me, because the same intervention can look strong or weak depending on the yardstick.

Ranking the Sources

From weakest to strongest, my sources ranked as follows: the vendor brochure, the news story, the suspicious article, which I excluded, a single small trial I read in the original, two moderate-sized trials and the meta-analysis. The ranking followed design and transparency rather than how confident a source sounded.

What the Evidence Supports

The research suggests that text reminders produce a real but modest improvement in adherence, smaller than the vendor claims and probably smaller still when measured objectively. I recommended that my company test the service in two pharmacies for six months and compare refill records with two similar pharmacies, rather than buying it for all eleven.

Conclusion

Searching systematically and judging sources by design, transparency and relevance changed my answer from "the vendor says forty percent" to "the evidence suggests a modest benefit worth testing." That shift is the habit graduate study is meant to build.

References

Beall, J. (2012). Predatory publishers are corrupting open access. Nature, 489(7415), 179. https://doi.org/10.1038/489179a

Open Science Collaboration. (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251), Article aac4716. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aac4716

Sumner, P., Vivian-Griffiths, S., Boivin, J., Williams, A., Venetis, C. A., Davies, A., Ogden, J., Whelan, L., Hughes, B., Dalton, B., Boy, F., & Chambers, C. D. (2014). The association between exaggeration in health related science news and academic press releases: Retrospective observational study. BMJ, 349, Article g7015. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.g7015

Thakkar, J., Kurup, R., Laba, T.-L., Santo, K., Thiagalingam, A., Rodgers, A., Woodward, M., Redfern, J., & Chow, C. K. (2016). Mobile telephone text messaging for medication adherence in chronic disease: A meta-analysis. JAMA Internal Medicine, 176(3), 340-349. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2015.7667