Why do we need research? 

For myself, it is a scholarly inquiry, curiosity, and the desire to learn more about the world. I want to be able to discuss issues in the mustang community in a voice that is backed by as much scholarly research as I can find.

Research is not perfect, scientists aren’t always truthful and falsify, skew, or fudge their data (read up on the Fat vs. Big Sugar issue, a recent discovery that changed the way we view the relative nutrition of fatty foods.). A lot of research is funded by grants (money) and some grants come from big companies. The companies, in turn, have agendas and sometime scientist may tweak data to please their benefactors to get more grants. There are also predatory journals which publish articles that are not scholarly or scientific so just because you see someone “published,” it may not mean much (more about those journals later). This is why reputable journals are peer reviewed, or examined minutely by experts in the field who are good at spotting false data and questionable analyses.

If you find a lot of studies that say the same thing over and over (vaccines are safe and not to linked autism) and one study that conflicts with those studies (vaccines cause autism). It might be prudent to err on the side of the majority and conclude vaccines do NOT cause autism (and the author of the ‘vaccines cause autism study ‘admitted he made up his data; he lied). Most data is scientifically rigorous, subject to strict rules and regulations including behavior regarding human and animal subjects in research. This committee that oversees research is called the “Institutional Review Board”.

The IRB: Every University or college that conducts research must have an Institutional Review Board (IRB) which oversees the subjects in research whether human or animal. The rules are very strict and this group reviews EVERY proposed study. If you want to know more, Google the university name and IRB. You’ll find a ton of information regarding animal handling, care, and what is acceptable and humane. They have links to report studies you think are behaving in an unethical manner, however you must have first hand knowledge of the behavior and you need proof. You can’t use a recycled photo of a horse with sutures/staples along the animal’s flank claiming this study is harmful. Remember, a university may not agree with your definition of ethical, however the IRB is in place to ensure the research is generally regarded as ethical, and is conducted in a manner protecting the welfare of the participants. I picked Montana State University as an example, please take a look. (http://www.montana.edu/orc/iacuc/).

How to conduct research

First, you must begin with a question. We will look at the lethal white syndrome as an example later. The best place to start is Google Scholar. You can use plain Google, but if you’re looking for research studies, it’s a better place to start your search. Go to Google and type in Scholar, this will take you to Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/

Now you need keywords– words that will help refine your search on your topic. You’ll need to be as accurate as possible to narrow the search field. Sometimes the keywords are terms you may not agree with such as the keyword “feral” for wild horses, but it is a scientific term used to describe undomesticated, unowned horses. Use different but similar words like horse, stallion, band, herd, mare, foal, wild, feral, mustang, equine, equid, behavior, ethology; you get the idea. Once you get an article that deals with your topic, the authors often provide keywords for their article, and this can help you find better keywords to refine your search efforts along with the titles of the articles themselves.

Remember, all you need is one or two decent studies published on your topic in the past five years or so to seed your research studies. From those studies, the reference list at the end of each article is a treasure trove of other articles related to your search. Other useful types of articles are systematic reviews, meta-analysis, or an integrative review. These studies are reviews of a lot of other studies. A “Systematic Review of the Temperament of Chestnut Horses” would be a study examining a lot of other studies on chestnut horse temperament. It’s a summary of the available research and very useful to find. Some of the journal publishing groups will allow you to view the abstract AND will list all the articles that used that article in their study. The “cited by…” is an excellent tool and is often a springboard to other articles related to your topic. Sometimes the web page will ‘suggest’ other studies based on your search terms/keywords. (See the research example below). Use systematic review, meta-analysis, integrative review or open access in your searches.

Abstracts without the full study. As you perform research, you may find there is a fee to view the whole article. Some research is Open Access and the author/publisher posts the full version visible to everyone; some journals are private.  Unless you are affiliated (work for a university, you are a student and have access to a university library), you may not be able to read the whole article. The abstract is an excellent starting point it’s a summary of the study and gives a quick overview of to what the researchers discovered in their study. If you can’t get the full article, the abstract gives you a general idea of the findings of the study and is meaningful.

If you are lucky enough to have an entire article to read, I usually start with the abstract, then the background and significance, followed by the discussion/conclusion. I like to know what the researchers found before I read through the methods, data analysis, and results sections. If you want to research and do a decent job, learn the basics of research. Invest in few good books on research and a beginner’s guide to statistics. Most data are analyzed using statistics, and a basic knowledge is useful. (Note that the word data is plural in scientific research).

Journals: Size does matter

Journals: How do you know if a journal is respected and scholarly? It is pretty simple, it is the number of citations and consistently publishing scholarly, scientifically rigorous research papers. A citation is a reference or footnote where the author of one article quotes or takes excerpts from another article. They are usually written as (Hudes-Lowder, 2016) or add a number to the sentence. Hudes-Lowder said all Thoroughbreds are great horses^{1 .} This number or article referenced can usually be found at the end of the paper or the bottom of the page if it is a footnote. Unless a citation is enclosed in quotes, the author is paraphrasing the results of another research study. 

If a research article is scientifically rigorous and scholarly, people will use it as a reference in their paper, so articles with a lot of citations are considered good research.  How can you find this magic number? The impact factor is defined as the number of citations, go to Resurchify and you’ll be able to locate the journal’s “impact factor.”  Type in the name of a journal and see the impact factor. The higher the number, the more citations found for articles in that journal. Most journals are between 0.5-5 although a few medical journals in medicine have an impact factor greater than forty. It is not a perfect system, but it does offer a way to quantify research. Be a research snob, only use the best journals and well cited articles!

What are peer reviewed journals? By strict definition, a peer-reviewed journal is one in which the submitted articles are reviewed by “peers” in your chosen field of science. For example, a nursing journal is reviewed by other nurses.  The term “peer” is a bit of misnomer because the review board members are regarded as experts in their field and not necessarily on the same scientific or academic level as new graduate right out of a Masters level program who is looking to publish their research study. However, peer-reviewed journals are more scholarly, and therefore better than non-peer reviewed journals since the submitted articles are judged by a panel of experts. The exception to this type of peer review are the predatory pay- per-publication journals (see below).

Scholarly vs. Predatory Pay-per-Publication Journals 

An infamous self-proclaimed ‘wildlife ecologist’ in the mustang community named Craig Downer published a paper (2014) in the Journal of Life Science call “The Horse and Burro as Positively Contributing Returned Natives in North America” . Curious, I looked up the journal’s impact factor but could not find any reference to this journal. I went to the journal’s website and found it was a member of the Science Publishing Group. Claiming to be peer reviewed, this group publishes journals, none of which were familiar. Immediately, I became suspicious that this was a predatory pay-per-publication journal. There is a website that tracks these journals called Beall’s List and these fake-journals essentially publish anything for a fee. The peers who review the submitted journals are often fictions or scientists with no standing in the scientific community.  Mr. Downer could not find a reputable scientific journal to publish his study, so he paid the Science Publishing Group instead. Resorting to these predatory journals is a clear indicator that the study is poorly researched, lacks significant credibility, and has little value to the scientific or mustang communities.

These predatory journals have no credibility, no academic, or scientific value, and they are regarded as jokes by most scientists. Only very desperate scientists and people who were dismissed from colleges, universities, and research labs publish in these journals. To the average person who doesn’t know much about research, it looks prestigious to see an article published in a peer-review viewed journal but remember, not all journals are equal. They are called predatory because they prey on recent graduates who may have trouble publishing and may not know these journals are disreputable. Sadly, international student get roped into paying a lot of money to ‘publish’ in an American journal without knowing it is the scientific equivalent of the National Enquirer.  While I was in school, I regularly received emails from predatory journals and my university warns students about them early in most programs. My daughter Abby published in the journal “Personality and Individual Differences” while in high-school and she still receives emails asking her to publish “for a small fee” and even to sit on the “peer review boards” of some of the more sketchy journals at the age of sixteen. (Link to Abby’s article) & (Click here for the Impact Factor of her journal).

Along with poor quality journals, avoid articles published in magazines like Time. Time magazine utilizes decent research, but you should review the reference list at the end of the article. The same applies to a newspaper, ANYTHING you read online, Wikipedia, people who quote or cite themselves, and always remember to question everything. Just because it is online, that doesn’t mean it is true and check citations. People can write anything and claim it came from a source, but you should check the actual source.  Even reputable scholarly journals can be fooled by research so keep an open mind and be curious. It is surprising how much false information is on the Internet especially in the mustang advocacy.

Remember if an article you are reading comes from a journal that asks for money to publish and offers 50% off your first article; it’s best to ‘move along, these are not the journals you are looking for’.
-Dr Hudes-Lowder

Books are available online or in libraries, and these can be used for research. For scientific research, it is best to avoid ‘self-published’ books from Blurb, CreateSpace, or similar self-publishers. It’s not to say these books are without merit, but they are usually not strong examples of rigorous scientific inquiry. If they had more scientific merit, they would have been picked up by a publishing house. Many represent the view of the author and not necessarily hard science, so it’s probably best to leave the conspiracy theorists on the shelf when conducting serious and scholarly research. 

Research example:

Research example:

I decided to research ‘lethal white syndrome’ as an example because it appears in mustang populations and I am fascinated by coat colour inheritance. It is an inherited condition and as the name states, lethal in newborn foals. I did a blog post about this condition located here.

I went to Google Scholar and typed “lethal white syndrome in horses” and selected the article “ The impact of the mutation causing overo lethal white syndrome on white patterning in horses”. I like articles with titles I comprehend immediately, with this in mind, I selected the second link.  

The PDF icon (also document or text icon) is great to find. This means the article is free and you can download it. I usually recommend downloading any article you can on your topic. The reference section at the back of each article is also an excellent resource. Create a folder with your research topic as the folder name and download all articles and abstracts to that folder. A good recommendation is to save the file with the title of the article rather than the alphanumerics that is usually the filename – otherwise, you’ll have fifteen articles with names like 1234569horsesaregreat.pdf, and you’ll end up having to open each one to find the article you are looking for.

The article “[PDF] The impact of the mutation causing overo lethal white syndrome on white patterning in horses” is in the journal American Association of Equine Practitioners which has a respectable impact factor of 2.888 (2020) and is published by Science Direct which is well regarded in the scientific community. As a reminder, you can find a journal’s Impact Factor at Resurchify. One of the authors has a PhD which is important because it means he worked for a minimum of two and as many as six years at a university performing research, evaluating scientific studies, and learning how to write for scientific publications. 

CiteScore and Journal Impact Factor are similar in that they tally the number of citations a research article generates, but the CiteScore calculation is based on the Scopus database, while Impact Factor is .

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Arizona State University (and Karen McLain’s alma mater) has a nice chart:

Scopus vs. Web of Science

Feature	Scopus (as of 01/2020)	Web of Science (as of 01/2020)
Indexed Journals	25,100 active14,558 inactive	21,100
Indexed Proceedings	120,000 events9.8 million papers	210,000 events70 million citations (individual papers not listed)
Date Range	1970 – present	1900 – Present (ASU will maintain access to indexing from 1900 to 2020)
Update Frequency	Daily	Daily
Citation Analysis	Yes	Yes
Export Records	Yes	Yes
Export Reports	Yes	Yes
Alerts Service	Yes	Yes
Author Profiles	Generated and edited by Scopus	Author created and edited through ResearcherID

Sources: 

Scopus data: Scopus Content Coverage Guide
Web of Science data: Web of Science Core Collection
Table adapted from Iowa State University Library’s “Scopus vs. Web of Science vs. Google Scholar” Comparison Chart

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Once you have the article or the abstract on a particular topic, print them out. Now, sit down with a large cup of coffee and at least five highlighters in different colors, a four color pen and read. Highlight things that make sense and get a feel for the study and what authors found in their research. Keep a legal pad hand and write the author(s)and the date of the study- then summarize.  If you plan to publish your spectacular research online, download a copy of “EndNotes” (http://endnotes.com) and use it to format your word processor in a scholarly fashion It puts in your citations and formats your reference section. It’s free and wonderful. It will format for APA, MLA, and AMA as well as other recognized scientific formats

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I sincerely hope this blog was useful, if you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me: drmhudeslowder@gmail.com

-Dr. Meredith Hudes-Lowder
B.A., Binghamton University; B.S., Binghamton University. M.S., Stony Brook University; D.N.P., Stony Brook University

Doctorate of Nursing Practice
“Patient Acceptance of Decreased Cervical Cancer Screening Frequency in an Urban Practice“