Healthcare Research

The rise of interest in research methods If you search on Amazon.co.uk for books on research methods in health, you will find a little over 1600 titles. There are books on statistics, books on evaluation, on qualitative research, on mixed methods research, on survey questionnaires, books for clinicians and books aimed specifically at students doingwork for degrees. There are books for nurses, psychologists, social workers and sports scientists, as well as for professional groups that few of us have heard of. Clearly someone – the authors and editors of these books as well as the publishers – believes that their target audiences will be interested in research enough to buy these books and, as an optional extra, read them. Similarly, a few years ago colleagues and I studied published research which had appeared in nursing journals. The Research Outputs Database is a database of published biomedical research that can be searched by computer, developed by the Wellcome Trust. Between