Abstract: A brief analysis of two papers regarding the effects of vitamin D on schizophrenia patients. For the purposes of this brief, I will compare a popular paper, “The Effect of Vitamin D on Psychosis and Schizophrenia” (Greenblatt, 2016) with a scholarly paper, “The Relationship between Symptom Severity and Low Vitamin D Levels in Patients with Schizophrenia” (Bulut et al., 2016), not reporting on them.
Keywords: Vitamin D, schizophrenia, psychosis
Literature Review
Dr. James Greenblatt’s paper, “The Effect of Vitamin D on Psychosis and Schizophrenia,” (2016) the author summarizes the wide range of recent research concerning the effects of vitamin D levels on patients with psychosis or schizophrenia. Similarly, the scholarly article, “The Relationship between Symptom Severity and Low Vitamin D Levels in Patients with Schizophrenia,” (Bulut et al., 2016) contains a literature review concerned with others’ research into the topic at hand, but the authors go much more in depth in their analysis, especially when comparing other’s results to their own research.
Comparing & Contrasting Popular & Scholarly Papers
While the popular paper is concerned with only other people’s research into the effects of vitamin D on schizophrenia and psychosis patients, the authors of the scholarly paper both analyzed other people’s research and conducted their own research study. The authors of the scholarly study also referenced other research when drawing conclusions about their own research in pointing out where they could expand their research in the future or pay more specific attention to the effects of certain ethnic groups (as a factor of vitamin D levels due to melanin in the skin). The popular article rarely mentions the specific research methods used in the studies that the author is summarizing, and only calls out two: meta-analysis and cross-sectional analysis. Additionally, the author of the popular article seems to primarily concern himself with quantitative tests, such as lab result levels of patients and whether or not the patient had schizophrenia, whereas the authors of the scholarly paper take a m...
