Nursing Scholarly Writing & Evidence-Based Practice: Searching for Articles

Trying keyword or subject searching alone can find quality results, but it's still better to test and document multiple keyword and subject term searches. You can even combine these searches, as the example below shows: we built a subject heading search on the topic of type 2 diabetes and added in additional keywords (food OR diet OR nutrition).

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• CINAHL Complete

  Top nursing and allied health journals, evidence-based care sheets and quick lessons. Provides full-text access for more than 1,300 nursing & allied health journals, including:

  • American Nurse Today (2013 - present)
  • Clinical Journal of Oncology (2000 - present)
  • Online Journal of Issues in Nursing (2002 - present)
  • Trauma Nursing ( 2005 - present)

• MEDLINE

  National Library of Medicine's bibliographic database covering the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, allied health, and pre-clinical sciences.
• ProQuest: Health & Medicine

  Covers the subjects of Medical Science, Nursing, Allied Health, Public Health, and Pharmacology, including the following journals:

  • Cancer Nursing Practice (2014 - present)
  • Journal of Emergency Nursing (2013 - present)

Connecting Concepts....

• Join similar ideas or alternate terms with OR enclosed in parentheses: eg: (diet OR nutrition)
• Link different parts of your topic with AND, eg: nutrition AND heart disease
• Exclude concepts with NOT, eg: dementia NOT alzheimer's

Keywords Are....

• A good way to start a search
• The important concepts of your clinical question in your own words

Subject Terms...

• They are specific, medical and technical terms that describe what the article is about

Truncation....

• Use an asterisk * to find word variants; eg: nurs* will find nurses, nurse, nursing

Quotation Marks....

• Use quotation marks around a keyword phrase when you want to tell the database that those words must appear next to one another; eg: "nursing students"

Limit your search results by date, type of publication, language, and more.

Interlibrary Loan Request: If you do not find what you're looking for at the SAU Library, we can go to other libraries that subscribe to the journal and have them send us a copy.NOTE: **Please allow anywhere from 2 days to 2 weeks to process your request

Please use the link below to complete the form below to request an article. Use your login credentials to get started:

•  You can find a direct link to the ClioWeb interface here. 
• Video for how to submit an Interlibrary Loan request!