As healthcare reporters, we often rely on studies to inform our articles and back up the main points. But research can also be a good source of story ideas to pitch to editors. At the November Lunch and Learn, we talked with Tara Halle, one of AHCJ’s Health Beat Leaders who has educated journalists about using studies. We discussed how to decipher whether studies are worth covering and how and where to find ones that could generate story ideas. Here are some tips from the session:
- Studies to look for include those that buck a trend in other research. Be sure to see who funded the study to avoid ones that might be biased. For example, be cautious if the funder is a pharmaceutical company or even nonprofit that wants to change the conversation around a topic.
- Look for meta-analyses. When they are done well, these can be a good resource because they have a lot more data than one smaller study. And, although it may be telling you something you may already know, these kinds of analyses bring a lot of evidence together in one article.
- When determining if a study is worth writing about, you can look at effect size, clinical significance and statistical significance.
- Effect size tells you the magnitude of the difference between groups being studied. For instance, a study may find that people with a particular cancer taking a new drug in one arm of the study lived two months longer than people in another arm of the study taking a different drug.
- Clinical significance is whether or not something might change practice or move the needle on a topic.
- A study result is statistically significant if it is likely to be real, reliable and not due to chance. If you are uncertain about the statistical significance of a study, you can talk with an expert in that space to find out.
- If something in a study jumps out at you, take some time to follow it down the rabbit hole. Sometimes you can get a great story idea by being curious, and asking questions of the study authors or other experts to find out additional information.
- Set up alerts on PubMed. If you are interested in certain areas of healthcare, you can sign up for alerts that will send you research in those topics as it is published.
