NURS 201: Edwards, J.: Finding articles

Suggested Databases

The vast majority of free scholarly, peer-reviewed articles are in journals that TCC stores online. The easiest way to identify articles on your topic and retrieve the full text is to use the Library's databases.

For nursing topics and evidence based practice (EBP) resources, we recommend the following databases:

Search Terms & Search Tips

• Consider using nurs* in one of your search boxes. Nurs* gives the search engine directions to find every word beginning with those four letters: nurse, nurses, nurse's, nurses', nursing
• To force the search engine to look for two or more words in a particular order and with no other words in between, use the phrase search. Place the phrase in quotation marks: "diabetic foot"  "culturally competent nursing"
• If you are unsure of the form of a word (or the spelling!) use an asterisk as a wild card. For example: diabet* will return results containing diabetes, diabetic, diabetics 
• Use the "Boolean operator" AND to make sure that the search engine searches for all of your words or phrases. AND directs the search engine to provide results that contain the items on both sides of the operator, for example, intubation AND emergency
• Use the "Boolean operator" OR to look for synonymous terms. For example, if I am wondering whether there is an organization centered around caring for obese patients, I might search Google like this: "bariatric nursing" AND (association OR organization OR society).  This means I'll take any results that include the phrase bariatric nursing and any one of the other three terms.

Evidence-Based Practice Handout 

The handout below contains step-by-step instructions with screenshots for searching CINAHL, ProQuest, and PubMed for evidence-based practice resources.

The following are some example topics and the search strings you might use to find peer-reviewed articles for your health disparity assignment (please feel free to copy and paste any of the search strings directly into of the databases to the left or use them as a guide for creating your own). Note that ProQuest is our largest database and often has more results than the others.

Topic: Using patient education to prevent myocardial infarction in African Americans.

Search string: "patient education" AND ("heart disease" OR "myocardial infarction") AND ("African American" OR black)

Topic: Using patient education to prevent HIV in Alaskan Natives.

Search string: ("Alaskan Native" OR "indigenous people of Alaska") AND (HIV OR "human immunodeficiency virus") AND "patient education"

Topic: Using diet to prevent hypertension in African Americans

Search string: (black OR African American) AND hypertension AND diet

Topic: Using patient education to increase rates of cervical cancer screening in Hispanic or African American women.

Search string: patient education AND cervical cancer screening AND (Hispanic OR black OR African American)