Start with these databases to find scholarly articles and research for evidence-based practice.
The new EBSCO interface for CINAHL defaults to the Advanced Search, where you can organize your search in three boxes. Use the AND, OR, NOT connectors as appropriate. You can also select from the Filters options to better focus your search.
You can also access the full range of filters from your results screen by clicking on the Filters button, which opens up a list of filters.
Make use of these helpful filters and limiters:
peer reviewed (article has been reviewed by experts in the field before being accepted for publication)
research (an article that reports the results of a research study which will include the purpose of the study, methodology, and results)
first author is a nurse (remember that this database includes allied health, therefore some articles are written by professionals in fields allied to nursing)
any author is a nurse
in the Document Type Box -- journal article
in the Geographic Subset Box -- USA (searches for journals published in the USA)
Search Options gives you the option to change the search mode, although for most searches Proximity (Boolean phrase) searching is to be recommended. Under Expanders the default is to search equivalent subject terms, but you also have the option to select "Apply related words." If you are still not getting the results you expect, you can select "Also search within the full text of articles." This can be useful if you are looking for very specific information.
SOME TIPS:
The Ovid platform contains five distinct databases, make sure you are on USC Upstate Full Text Nursing & Allied Health Journals@Ovid to search for scholarly journal articles. You can click "Change" to change to any of these other databases:
The name of the database you are searching is over the top of the search box. Under the search box are two boxes that by default are checked. The "Include Related Terms" box is useful because it expands your search to include synonyms and related terms to your keywords.
Open up the Limits tab to find more ways to limit your search. This is where you can limit the date range of your search by entering years for Publication Year.
To limit your search to specific types of articles related to evidence-based practice:
The JBI Evidence-Based Practice Database is one of the databases using the Ovid interface. It defaults to the Multi-Field Search, which allows you to organize your search into multiple boxes and to choose different fields to search at the same time.
This screen shot shows how your search results are displayed.
The Joanna Briggs Institute, based at the University of Adelaide, Australia, collaborates with 70 institutions worldwide to "promote and support the synthesis, transfer and utilization of evidence through identifying feasible, appropriate, meaningful and effective healthcare practices to assist in the improvement of healthcare outcomes globally."
MEDLINE is a large citation database of the biomedical journal literature produced by the National Library of Medicine, part of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) of the National Institutes of Health. It contains over 25 million references, most to scholarly journal articles. MEDLINE is the primary component of PubMed, the freely available database provided by the NCBI. MEDLINE Ultimate is a version produced by EBSCO, using the EBSCO searching interface and providing full-text links for many articles.
While the interface is similar to CINAHL, MEDLINE has its own set of filters and limiters, so it is worth looking through them to find ways to focus your search. There is no longer a limiter for Nursing under Journal & Citation subset.
PubMed is a freely-accessible government database from the National Library of Medicine. In addition to MEDLINE, PubMed contains additional material, notably citations for journals not indexed in MEDLINE, journal articles and manuscripts submitted by publishers to PubMed Central, and books available online through the NCBI Bookshelf.
PubMed maps your search terms to MeSH (Medical Subject Headings), so for most searches you do not need to use punctuation, truncation, or Boolean connectors. (You can use these in the database, but they will turn off the automatic mapping.) There is also an Advanced Search Builder useful for combining keywords from different search fields.
You can refine your results by limiting to a date range, selecting an article type, and other attributes on the left side of your results list. PubMed itself does not contain the full text of articles. If full text is available in PubMed Central, there will be a link in the results list. Note, too, that the database allows you to refine and sort results.
If articles are not available in full text through PubMed Central, you may be able to find a link to full text in the database record (click on the title from the results list). The link may lead you to freely-available full text on the web, to the article in one of the library's subscription databases if you are on campus or using Spartan GreenSky, or to a publisher's page with information on how to get the article. If not freely available, look up the citation in Journal Search. Notice that the name of the journal in the database record is abbreviated!
See the links below for more information and tips on using PubMed:
Although you can search PubMed Central (PMC) directly, links to full-text articles in PMC are included in results in PubMed. While there is an overlap with MEDLINE, there are also a number of non-MEDLINE journals in PMC.
The PMC record includes the citation under the journal banner. Note that the journal name is abbreviated and is followed by the volume, issue, and page numbers and the DOI number. The title of the article follows with the author(s). Next follows the Abstract and finally the text of the article in HTML format. If alternate formats such as PDF are available, you will find a link at the top right of the record.
SEARCH TIPS
ScienceDirect's Advanced Search has progressively become simpler and less useful. You can no longer limit your search to a specific subject area or even type of article. For this reason, it is best to get to articles in ScienceDirect through an indexing database like CINAHL. If you do choose to search the database directly:
If you find an article without full text and don't find a link to full text in another database, use the Journal Search feature on SearchUp (look for it in the tabs above the search box) and search by JOURNAL TITLE to see which databases have full text for the journal.
The following worksheet and research log may be helpful with your searching.
