behavior problems among your clients, or more accurately detect moderate to severe depression. It's helpful to be specific and avoid broad outcomes that are hard to assess such as general wellbeing.
Most of the sites, however, will not enable you to read the original research studies yourself. Instead, they'll present summaries of the research and perhaps offer EIP guidelines. In Chapter 8 we describe a rigorous approach to searching and synthesizing research called a systematic review. That chapter describes which attributes to look for in a research review to give you a sense of the quality of the review.
You should be cautious and exercise some healthy skepticism when encountering websites that tout particular treatment approaches or other tools that you might use in your practice. Some sites, for example, might have a vested interest in promoting or debunking a particular treatment modality you are investigating. Table 2.2 lists five of the first 10 links that came up when we entered the search term EMDR in Google. The first two entries provide a brief, unbiased summary of the evidence supporting the effectiveness of EMDR as well as some of the questions and controversies about that evidence. The third and fourth entries are websites for organizations that promote EMDR. If you go to the third and fourth sites, you will find information about the effectiveness of EMDR (including mention of some prestigious organizations that have designated it an effective treatment for posttraumatic stress), but you will not find any mention of the questions and controversies about its effectiveness. The fifth site provides an overview of those controversies and questions. If you go to any of the last three links, you will see a slanted discussion that attempts to either support or refute EMDR's effectiveness. (We say this not to imply that we disagree with the points made in that discussion. In fact, we happen to believe that EMDR is effective under certain circumstances. It's just that these discussions are not written in as unbiased a manner as are the summaries at the first two sites listed in Table 2.2.)
TABLE 2.2 Web Search Example Using the Term EMDR at http://Google.com
| Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing - Wikipedia, the… http://en.wikipedia.org/…/Eye_movement_desensitization_and_reprocessin… |
| Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a form of psychotherapy that was developed by Francine Shapiro to resolve the development of… |
| EMDR: Taking a Closer Look: Scientific American http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=emdr-taking-a-closer… Jan 3, 2008 - Can moving your eyes back and forth help to ease anxiety? |
| EMDR Institute, Inc. http://www.emdr.com Offers therapy. Provides a history of the approach, including a discussion of the Adaptive Processing Model. Also includes references and contact information. |
| EMDR International Association http://www.emdria.org |
| The EMDR International Association (EMDRIA) is a professional association… eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) - The… http://www.skepdic.com/emdr.html May 16, 2011 - Discusses the usefulness of eye movement in treatments. Focuses on studies and research data. |
Note: Search performed using Google on October 14, 2011.
2.2.1 Some Useful Websites
You should look for websites that provide objective reviews. Two highly regarded sources of rigorous, objective reviews can be found at the websites of the Cochrane Collaboration and the Campbell Collaboration. Both of these sibling collaborations recruit groups of experts to conduct each review. The reviews provided by the Cochrane Collaboration focus on health and healthcare interventions broadly, including caregiving, workforce, mental health, and substance abuse treatment, and can be accessed at www.cochrane.org. In addition to its reviews, that site provides links to critical appraisals of the reviews, bibliographies of studies, and other information, including information to help readers appraise the quality of its review system.
The Campbell Collaboration reviews focus on social welfare, education, and criminal justice. You can access its website at www.campbellcollaboration.org. Even though the Cochrane and Campbell Collaborations are maintained separately, they do include overlapping areas of research. For example, reviews of mental health-relevant research can be found in both libraries of systematic reviews.
Another other highly regarded source is the American Psychological Association's website (http://www.apa.org/divisions/div12/rev_est) on empirically supported treatments.
Government sites can be another good option. One such site, for example, is the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress (www.ncptsd.va.gov/publications/cq/v5/n4/keane.html).
Rather than rely exclusively on reviews, which as we have noted can be risky, you can review individual studies yourself. One way to do that is by going to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) government website (http://www.nlm.nih.gov) to get free access to a professional literature database called MedLine, which is provided by the National Library of Medicine and includes journal citations and abstracts. In response to increased calls for public access to taxpayer-supported research, NIH implemented a new public access policy in 2008 that required that any published results of NIH-funded research be submitted to a digital archive and made accessible to the public no later than 12 months after publication. This digital archive is called PubMed Central. The PubMed website (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed) provides access to both MedLine citations and abstracts as well as full text articles when available through PubMed Central.
Another option is provided by Google and called Google Scholar. You can access it through Google by entering Google Scholar as your search term. This Google search option is designed to broadly identify scholarly literature and is helpful in narrowing down sources to journal articles, chapters, reports, and books. For example, when we entered the search term EMDR into Google Scholar, the first 10 sources were all peer-reviewed articles from journals such as the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology and the Journal of Anxiety Disorders. If you do have access to a university library as a student, field instructor, or alumnus, Google Scholar is increasingly linked to the full text of articles through university library collections.
2.2.2 Search Terms
Whether you use Medline, Google Scholar, or some other professional literature database, the process for electronically retrieving individual studies is essentially the same. Typically, you begin by entering a search term connected to your practice question. For example, questions about what interventions are most effective in treating physically or sexually abused girls with posttraumatic stress disorder
