Use all available help when carrying out pharmacy practice research

This month we are starting a series of articles to help you to get to grips with the basics of pharmacy practice research. This series is aimed at pharmacists with limited experience of the research process. Our intention is to provide you with an outline of some key issues involved in conducting and disseminating a small, yet scientifically robust, piece of pharmacy practice research. We begin with articles covering the issues that you will have to address before you start data collection. These will include formulating your research question, doing a literature review and selecting your research design. You may then need to get the permission required under research governance to do the study - including permission from the ethics committee. Subsequent articles in the series will look at some of the common research methods, including questionnaires, postal surveys, structured interviews and data extraction from medical records. We will also cover some of the methods that are less common outside of academia, such as qualitative research. Finally, there will be some advice on writing a research paper for submission to a journal.