Abstract
Use of new nursing knowledge has improved nursing practice and patient care outcomes. However, the busy bedside duties nurses face constitute barriers to reading and evaluating research. The nurse may want to use new knowledge about pain assessment, wound care, preoperative fasting, and depression screening to improve practice but may lack the skills and know how to evaluate the research critically. Barriers to analysis of the research include confusing technical terminology, statistics, and unclear research reports. The nurse needs to understand and examine the steps, cohesiveness, merits, and weaknesses of the research to assess his or her level of confidence in the findings. This article describes the criteria for analysis of the sections of a research report and illustrates ways that sound research has improved patient care.