title: Making a difference through research.
abstract: practicing nurses are in the best position to identify nursing practice problems and to ask the important questions that will change practice and improve patient outcomes. Nurses can compensate for insufficient knowledge about a practice problem by conducting their own research. Conducting an effective research study involves identifying a significant nursing problem, conducting a thorough review of the literature, selecting a research design, determining the sample size, developing a research proposal, and performing the research.
authors.affiliation: Department of Nursing Research and Innovation, The Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, Ohio, USA.
authors.forename: Sandra L
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Siedlecki
mesh_terms: D015400:Clinical Nursing Research / Q000193:education / Q000458:organization & administration* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D028744:Ethics Committees, Research; D055318:Evidence-Based Nursing / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006801:Humans; D013527:Perioperative Nursing; D012107:Research Design