Our Process

We go through them all, but don’t tell you about all of them. Instead, we only write up reviews of articles that are immediately clinically applicable. This process is one of the things that makes the reviews so time efficient. SLPs don’t need to know about all the research, every single month. Instead, they need to know about the things that could change their clinical practice.

Basically, when we’re reading through the hundreds of articles published each month from the above journals, narrowing first by title, then by abstract, then reading the full article, at each step along the way, we ask ourselves ”Is this potentially relevant to SLPs’ daily practice?”. When the answer is YES, we review it for our members. When NO, we set it aside.

Most months, this yields at least five to ten articles to review, per section (so between 15 and 30 reviews across all three sections). In ”light” months, when not much has been published, we’ll include Throwback Pubs too, so that you always have plenty of great content to read. Throwback Pubs are articles published in the years before The Informed SLP® existed (so before 2016) and are the writers’ choice.

NOTE:

We always link you directly to the publisher’s website, where the article may be purchased. For more information on accessing journal articles, read here.

At The Informed SLP®, we’re comfortable with saying ”I don’t know”, and doing additional research as needed. You’ll notice that our writers are a team of people who all have both a research and clinical background, which is a minimum requirement to write for us. We’re learners at heart and enthusiastic investigators!

But not only are our writers quite skilled but, more importantly, every review also goes through an Editor, and sometimes also a Topic Area Expert, and is sent to the original journal article author pre-publication. Thus, every single review on our website has been examined by at least three people, and MOST of the time also by the original author of the research. You can’t get much more reliable than that!

Please reach out to us! We pride ourselves as being not only one of the most thorough, but also most transparent research resources for SLPs available. After all, why should you trust us to support you if it’s not super clear how we’re doing our research?

Email us any time at communications@theinformedslp.com, or reach out to us through any social media platform.

With continued data analysis, many journals on this list end up scouted twice annually. This happens when journals repeatedly publish one or fewer articles relevant to speech–language pathology, across four+ months of scouting. Journals that publish no articles relevant to speech–language pathology over the course of a year are removed from the list entirely.

We also hand-search PubMed and Google Scholar each month for key topics. We search keywords each month as well and have Google Scholar alerts set up to find articles. Over time, these searches give us the data needed to add more journals to the list above. However, we search certain terms every single month, as some topics are published in so many different journals that keyword searches make more sense than adding those journals to our scouting list.