Episode 2 - Let's talk basics

In the second episode of "Fact Check Your Health," Katie and Sydney provide a crash course on navigating health research like a pro. They break down the essentials of understanding research studies from Google Scholar or PubMed, focusing on the importance of different topics like sample sizes, conflicts of interest, and more. This episode equips you with the know-how to figure out what the different aspects of a research article mean, and which aspects are the most important to pay attention to!

By the end of this episode, you'll have a grasp on how to find accurate health information online and an overview of how to read academic articles so that you're one step closer to being able to make choices based on solid evidence, not just sensational soundbites or viral social media posts.

Podcast Outline:
0:50 - Study objective
1:28 - Study type/design
2:12 - Study sample size
2:40 - Study sample type
3:50 - Study results
5:30 - Author/Affiliations
6:05 - Citations
6:55 - Conflicts of interest
8:10 - Journals/Impact Factors
9:20 - Publishing date

For more information and additional resources check out the Fact Check Your Health website at https://factcheckyourhealth.squarespace.com

Disclaimer: The information provided is for educational and entertainment purposes and is not intended as medical advice. For medical advice contact a licensed medical provider.

Transcript

Episode 2

[00:00] Katie: All right, welcome back to the second episode of Fact Check Your Health. In the last episode, we talked about how the most reliable health sources are typically research studies that you're going to find on Google Scholar or PubMed. Now, in the rest of this podcast series, we're going to go through and teach you all the information that you see when you click on an article and teach you what that means and how to identify which information is the most important to pay attention to. So today we're going to jump in by going over the basic information of a research study that you'll be able to access for free whenever you go to Google Scholar or PubMed. Sydney, do you want to start by just taking everyone through an example?

[00:37] Sydney: Let's say that I type in magnesium and sleep into Google Scholar, and then I click on the first study, which is titled The Association of Magnesium Intake with Sleep, Duration and Sleep Quality. So when I click on the title, it's going to take me to a screen where I can see the abstract, and I first want to look for the study objective. So the study objective is usually listed in the first two sentences, and here they list the objective as they're trying to find the longitudinal association of magnesium with sleep quality and duration.

[01:08] Katie: So by looking at the objective, we can clearly see whether the article is actually relevant to the question that we're wanting to answer. So since the objective that we're trying to find is whether or not taking magnesium would help with sleep, then we can clearly see, from reading that objective, that this article is going to be relevant to the question that we're wanting to answer.

[01:27] Sydney: So then the second thing that we want to look for whenever we're reading the abstract is the study type. So the study type is actually going to be one of the most important things that we look for whenever we're trying to evaluate different studies. In episode three, we're going to go into more detail about these different types of studies, but for now, the different types of studies that you might see are randomized controlled trials, observational studies, systematic reviews, or meta-analyses. So as a rule of thumb, you're going to want to try to find the studies that are randomized controlled trials if you can. So if you see a study that lists this in the abstract, then that's definitely going to be a study that you want to pay attention to.

[02:06] Katie: So now that we've established the objective of the study and the study type, the next thing that we're going to want to look for in the abstract is the sample size. So for the study that we're looking at, we can see that there are almost 4,000 participants, which is a pretty good sample size. So in general, a bigger sample size is going to be better. So let's say that your study only has 30 participants in it, that's going to be a huge limitation because it's going to be less likely that those results could be generalized to the general public or larger samples of people.

[02:38] Sydney: So another thing that the abstract should always give a bit of information about is what types of people were in this study. So, for example, something that you want to look out for is whether the sample was a group of people that's representative of the general public or potentially representative of somebody like you, with similar demographics to you, or if the study was done on a very specific group of people.

[03:00] Katie: For example, let's say that the study sample only consisted of college students and you are someone in your fifties, then the results of that study might not necessarily be applicable to you.

[03:12] Sydney: So actually a problem that we have with some older studies that is something that needs to be explored a bit more, is we had a lot of clinical trials that were done on only men or only white participants. And then we've had medical recommendations made off of these clinical trials. And here we are years later and people are starting to ask, "Wait a minute, should we really still be going by these medical guidelines if all of these studies used a sample of people that aren't really representative of the whole entire general public?" You want a study that is representative of the general public, or at least representative of you.

[03:42] Katie: I think that's a really good point. Do you want to talk about the last thing to look for whenever you're reading through an abstract?

[03:48] Sydney: The last important piece you'll see in the abstract is the most important results from the study. This will not include all of the results, but it will include whatever the researcher thought was the most meaningful.

[03:59] Katie: And just as a little side note, whenever you're reading through the abstract, you might see some numbers and statistical phrases in there and to fully explain what all those mean would probably take us months. So, we don't have time to do that in this specific podcast series.

[04:13] Sydney: But while these numbers and statistics are very important in terms of research, for the sake of this podcast and what you'll be doing when you're looking at health research on your own, if you aren't sure what the numbers mean, you can always just read the sentence that the numbers are in and it should provide a description of what the statistics say.

[04:29] Katie: For example, let's say that we're looking at a sleep study, and the sentence said something like the study found that taking magnesium increases sleep by an odds ratio of 2.5 for the people that took magnesium compared to the people that didn't take magnesium. So, if you're not familiar with what an odds ratio is, you can just skip over the statistics that they put in that sentence and just read the words without it. So without it, the sentence would still tell you that the participants that took magnesium saw an increase in their sleep compared to the group that didn't take magnesium for their sleep.

[05:00] Sydney: You'll see all sorts of confusing numbers and symbols. But you really can just read around that. Look for words like increase, decrease, higher, lower; you don't need to interpret the exact numbers because like we said, it would take us forever to describe to you how to interpret those numbers so you really can just kind of read between the lines.

[05:18] Katie: So that sums up everything that you'll see when you look at an abstract. So in addition to the abstract, there are also going to be six other things that you'll see when you click on an article that can help provide information about the article. So the first things are going to be the author and the author's affiliation. Right under the title, you're going to see the author's name and then following the authors' names, there's going to be a little superscript, just like that tiny little number that's smaller above their name

. And that's going to denote the university or the business that they work for. So it can be beneficial to look at that, especially if you're interested in potential conflicts of interest or if you want to see if they might have maybe a financial motive, or something that could be a factor in their research.

[06:02] Sydney: So the next thing you might see are the number of times the article has been cited. If you aren't familiar with what a citation is, citations are essentially the number of times that this article has been referenced by other academic papers. So citations are one measure that academics use to look for reliability so if a paper has been cited, you know, a thousand times, it must be pretty well done, or at least interesting otherwise, it wouldn't have so many citations.

[06:27] Katie: But just as a disclaimer, while that is the rule of thumb, that's not always going to be the case. It could be possible that the study has a lot of citations even though it's not necessarily the highest quality. So while it's not a perfect measure, it is a measure that we can definitely use whenever we're unsure or we're just, trying to get an idea of how strong a study is that can be helpful to look at.

[06:47] Sydney: Yeah, definitely. Citations can sometimes be like going viral on Google Scholar. Once an article has been cited a lot, it can tend to continue to get more and more citations.

[06:57] Katie: So moving on to the next thing that you can usually see when you click on an article is if there's any conflicts of interest. So conflicts of interest are going to be something that could potentially be a conflicting interest to that researcher. So an example conflict of interest could be things like funding or employment or any type of financial motive, and the good thing is that researchers are ethically bound to report if they have any conflicts of interest.

[07:23] Sydney: Exactly. If they do have a conflict of interest, it will be listed typically at the bottom of the page under the heading titled "Conflicts of Interest". We're not saying that if somebody has a conflict of interest that their study is completely invalid but it's just something that you wanna be aware of.

[07:38] Katie: Yeah, because I feel like, especially with certain products, research can be really expensive. So sometimes the only people that have the money or the motivation to do research to see if a product works is that company. So they might hire researchers to do a study to test to see if their product actually works. So even though there would be a conflict of interest in that scenario, it doesn't necessarily mean that the information isn't accurate or that the study is any less valid, it's just something to be aware of whenever we're looking at research studies. And another factor to consider when you're evaluating articles is where the article was published. So articles are typically published in journals, and that journal name is usually listed right under the author's name, and it's typically italicized.

[08:22] Sydney: And so then you can use the journal name to help determine how reputable the journal is. This is typically done by looking at the journal's impact factor. In simple terms, an impact factor is essentially a measure of how important a journal is to the field. If you want to look up a journal's impact factor, you can just type in the journal name followed by the impact factor into Google. So if you wanted to know "New England Journal of Medicine Impact Factor", you would type that into Google. As a rule of thumb, journals with higher impact factors are typically viewed more highly than journals with lower impact factors.

[08:56] Katie: That's a really good explanation, but again, just a disclaimer, it's not a perfect system. But it can be another measure to help you evaluate differences between studies. Typically journals that have higher impact factors have more qualifications or higher standards in what type of articles they accept. So that's why an impact factor could be a good measure to determine how reliable that information is.

[09:19] Sydney: For sure. And that brings us to the final thing that you'll be able to see whenever you look at an article. And that is the date that the article was published. So typically the exact date isn't super important when it comes to research. However, depending on how old the study is and if there are any newer studies that came to an opposite conclusion, it's possible that because of time or advancements in technology that we've learned new information that might be different and more accurate than what we previously believed.

[09:46] Katie: For example, let's say that a study done on pandemics 50 years ago, came to some conclusion that might not be as accurate as a study done on pandemics in 2023. So due to things like advances in medicine, over the past 50 years, how a pandemic looks currently in 2023 and studies done in 2023 might be more accurate than a study that was done 50 years ago about pandemics when they hadn't had a pandemic recently and when the world wasn't as interconnected. But on the other hand, sometimes it's going to be the case that time isn't going to make as much of a difference. So, for example, let's say that you had a study that was done on the effects of alcohol in 2010 versus a study that was done on the effects of alcohol in 2020. Most likely that 10-year difference between those two articles isn't going to make much of a difference because the effects of alcohol in our body, most likely didn't have a reason to change over the past 10 years.

[10:40] Sydney: So as you can see, even from this initial glimpse you can gather a lot of valuable information about a study just from clicking on the title and looking at the information that comes up.

[10:49] Katie: And that's a wrap for today's episode. I know that was a lot of information. So thanks so much for sticking with us.

[10:55] Sydney: Be sure to join us in our next episode where we'll explore the different types of study designs and discuss their strengths and limitations, which is my favorite part of this whole entire podcast and one that you really want to be there for.

[11:09] Katie: We'll see you then.