Wecome! This guide should serve as a starting point to search for research for your Introduction to Professional Nursing course.
Use the tabs at the top of the guide to get started on finding helpful background articles, information, and websites.
Your time and energy are valuable! Skip the stress and get fast and friendly help from a research expert: your Nursing Librarian, Lily Morgan. Email Lily or Call: 219-989-2523
Databases are organized collections of published and indexed materials, including many articles from academic journals, trade publications, and newspapers, as well as ebooks, streaming videos, and more specialized information resources for professionals in different fields.
The majority of library databases contain large collections of journal articles.
Most databases at the PNW Library provide access to full-text content, which means that you will find entire articles available as well as abstracts or summaries of articles. For example, the CINAHL Complete nursing database contains the full text of articles from over 700 nursing journals.
Scholarly Resources are generally written for an academic audience by experts in a specific subject discipline. NOTE: Often when an instructor says you need scholarly sources, they mean peer-reviewed articles. See below for information on peer-review.
Empirical Studies are a subset of scholarly articles that report the original findings of observational and/or experimental research studies. Common aspects found within an empirical article include: literature review, methodology, results, and discussion.
Examples of Scholarly Resources include: Academic/peer-reviewed journal articles (most common), books written by experts in a field, and formally published encyclopedias and dictionaries.
Peer Reviewed Journals & Articles: are evaluated by multiple experts in a journal’s subject discipline prior to publication. The peer-review process ensures that the articles published within peer-reviewed journals are academically rigorous and meet the required expectations of an article in that subject discipline.
Primary Sources in the field of Nursing typically refers to articles or other publications of Primary Research. Primary Research or "original research" means that the authors of an article or report are the same people who conducted the research and gathered the data discussed in that article/report. In other words, to be Primary Research, authors must be writing about their own original research.
Examples of Primary Sources/Primary Research include: randomized control trials, cohort studies, and case control studies.
Secondary Sources/Secondary Research occurs when authors are collecting, analyzing, and discussing existing research and data (research studies conducted by others). NOTE: Most journal articles include a Background section or brief review of previous research done on the topic- this does not mean that article cannot be primary research. You will need to identify the type of study it is and/or look at the Methods/Methodology and Results sections to determine if an article is primary or secondary.
Examples of Secondary Sources/Secondary Research include: systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and clinical practice guidelines.
When it comes to database searching, choosing keywords and subject terms is the most important step in the research process!
Keywords are words used to describe a topic. Keywords are natural-language vocabulary. That means they can come from any source and the database will look for these words anywhere within its records.
Subject headings are predefined words from a controlled vocabulary source such as a thesaurus. These words were assigned to articles by subject-specialists. MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) is the controlled vocabulary thesaurus produced by the National Library of Medicine. MeSH is widely used to index/classify articles in nursing research databases.
Articles in databases are organized by the subject terms and keywords that describe them. To find the journal articles you need, try to think like an article author. Different authors might use different terminology to describe the same topics or concepts, so keeping a log of all possible terms you may need to search for is vital to a successful search.
Don't search for full sentences. Search with the keywords and synonyms you came up with, and always check your spelling.
For example, if my research question is 'Among nurses in the ICU, does a mindfulness-based stress reduction program decrease the incidence of burnout symptoms?' I could search for the terms nurses, intensive care unit, ICU, mindfulness based stress reduction, and burnout. This image shows how this search looks on an Advanced Search page in a database:
This example uses Boolean operators and truncation - two search tools you can use to improve your search technique.
Boolean Operators AND, OR, and NOT are used to link your search terms together to either narrow or broaden your search results.
The Boolean Operator ‘AND’ retrieves articles that contain ALL terms. Using AND narrows your search. The example search from the diagram below, stroke AND paralysis, would retrieve articles that contain both terms.
The Boolean Operator ‘OR’ retrieves articles with either/any of the terms. Using OR broadens your search. Typically you will use OR with synonyms or related terms to capture the different words used to describe that concept. Using OR, the example search diagramed below would retrieve any results that included stroke, any that included brain infarction, any that contained ischemia, or any with two or all three of the terms.
The Boolean operator 'NOT' excludes terms from your search. Use NOT sparingly and carefully- if you use it at all- because in addition to excluding articles with the term you do not want, it may also exclude articles that are relevant to your research- but they will be removed from your results if they also contain the unwanted term. For the example diagrammed below, this search would retrieve articles with the term ischemic stroke and exclude articles with hemorrhagic stroke; it would also exclude articles that use both of those terms.
Diagrams by Rachel Miles: https://www.flickr.com/photos/184495897@N07/
Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) can be typed into the search box with your search terms, like this: stroke AND paralysis. You can also use the dropdown box the database has provided on the Advanced Search page, and type a term (stroke) in the first line, change the dropdown box to the Boolean term you want to use (AND, OR, NOT), and put your second term in the next search box (paralysis).
You will use Boolean operator AND to narrow your search results to articles that include the search terms you have chosen. The example below is an advanced search for articles related to stroke and paralysis.
You will use the Boolean operator OR to include alternate terms related to your topic in your search. Authors may use a variety of terms for different topics or concepts, so it's important to include any terms that are relevant to your research. The screenshot below shows how you can expand your search on the Advanced Search screen in CINAHL to include other terms that could be used in place of or in addition to stroke: brain infarction or ischemia. If this Advanced Search were written in a single line, it would look like this:
(stroke OR brain infarction OR ischemia) AND paralysis
You can use the Boolean operator NOT to exclude certain terms from your search results. Use NOT with caution- it can exclude results that may be relevant to your research. In the Advanced Search example below, any articles about ischemic stroke that also include hemorrhagic stroke will be excluded from your search results.
Phrase searching can be useful if you are looking for a very specific, multi-word term. When you use phrase searching, the database will return results that contain those exact words in the exact order they appear in the search box. To use phrase searching, you will put double quotation marks on either side of the multi-word term(s) that you want to search as a phrase.
(Note: single-word search terms do not need to be searched as phrases/put in quotation marks).
For example, if I am looking for a specific type of facial paralysis and I find multiple relevant MeSH descriptor terms, I might want to search for all of those terms using phrase searching and OR:
"facial palsy, upper motor neuron" OR "facial paralysis, central" OR "upper motor neuron facial palsy"
Truncation is an easy way to search for multiple versions of a word. If you remove the end of the word you want to truncate (leaving the root of the word) and replace the ending with an asterisk * this will expand your search to include all versions of the word. Truncating a word can not only give you a greater chance of finding articles on your topic; it will save you time because you won't have to type out all different versions of that word as separate search terms.
For example, we know an article about nurses might use the terms nurse, nurses, or nursing. If we truncate the root word as nurs* this will search any words that begin with the first four letters: nurs. Thus, using nurs* in our database search will retrieve articles that include the terms nurse, nursing, or nurses. More truncation examples:
Wildcards can find multiple versions of a word by using a wildcard character as a substitute for a character or characters at the beginning or middle of a word. For example, a search for wom#n will retrieve both woman and women. (Important Note: not all databases allow the use of wildcards, and different databases may use different characters as wildcards, such as an asterisk or question mark. If you're not sure about using wildcards in a database, look at their help/search tips page for more information). Find information about using truncation and wildcards for the CINAHL database.
Wildcards are also useful for terms that are spelled differently in other parts of the world, such as the American spellings of pediatric or color vs. the British spellings of paediatric and colour. The wildcard searches for those terms would look like this: p#ediatric and colo#r.
Databases offer additional ways for you to narrow down your results and exclude results you don't want. You can usually find limiters and filters in the form of checkboxes, drop-down menus, and/or date range sliders on the Advanced Search page of databases, or you may see them on the side of your results screen or under the searchbox. Every database platform looks different, but most offer similar options for limiting your results. Scan your screen to see what your options are or Ask a Librarian for help.
On the Ovid platform, filters are located further down on the results page:
Content adapted with permission from Grand Canyon University Library.
