Barriers and Suggested Solutions to Nursing Participation in Research: A Systematic Review with NLP Tools (Preprint)

Abstract

Healthcare research is pivotal for developing new treatments, improving care quality, and discovering novel treatment methods. Engaging medical staff in research is key to the success of the studies and the staff’s professional development. While physicians often participate in research, nurses are less likely to be involved. The literature outlines barriers to nurses’ involvement in research, such as lack of time and support from colleagues, and suggests solutions like offering advanced career opportunities and stipends to enhance their participation. Organizing the knowledge gained from nurses’ participation in research is essential to more clearly understand the barriers to conducting and implementing research studies.

This review aims to systematically identify and analyze barriers that hinder nurses from conducting research and implementing research findings, as well as the solutions suggested to these barriers.

: In accordance with Systematic Review Protocols (PRISMA), our systematic review was conducted through a multistep procedure that integrated both manual processing and novel automated natural language processing tools. The initial steps involved conducting a preliminary literature review and performing strategic searches in PubMed, Web of Science, and SCOPUS using selected keywords. We vectorized the documents using Sentence-BERT and TF-IDF, then applied cosine similarity to filter 206 relevant articles from an initial pool of 26,627, guided by the results of the preliminary literature review. We used GPT-4 to identify and categorize barriers and solutions in nursing research, extract study details, and analyze the development of these barriers and solutions over time.

We identified 635 barriers to nursing research across ten categories, notably Education, Organizational Support, and Time Constraints. Furthermore, 489 solutions to these barriers were identified and grouped, focusing on critical improvement areas like Educational Initiatives, Organizational Support, and Evidence-Based Practice Implementation.

Nursing research is crucial for improving health outcomes. Our review identified barriers to nursing research, their suggested solutions, and explored the relationship between these barriers and solutions. Overcoming these barriers can significantly improve research quality and its implementation. Using natural language processing tools is a promising approach for conducting systematic reviews.

N\A