Content Analysis Application in Nursing: A Synthetic Knowledge Synthesis Meta-Study
This is an incremental improvement for nursing researchers, making knowledge synthesis more efficient and cost-effective.
The study addressed the challenge of structuring knowledge from growing nursing research literature by applying synthetic content analysis, finding it widely used globally with positive trends and demonstrating it as an economically viable tool that automates routine synthesis activities.
Theoretical issues: With the explosive growth in the research literature production, the need for new approaches to structure knowledge emerged. Method: Synthetic content analysis was used in our meta-study. Results and discussion: Our meta-study showed that content analysis is frequently used in nursing research in a very wide spectrum of applications. The trend of its use is positive and it is used globally in a variety of research settings. The synthetic content analysis used in our study showed to be a very helpful tool in performing knowledge synthesis, replacing many of the routine activities of conventional synthesis with automated activities this making such studies more economically viable and easier to perform.