NSC 252 - Introduction to Professional Nursing

Where can I find research articles? 

There are many places where you can find nursing articles, and throughout your time in the nursing program you will use many of them. For now, we only ask you to familiarize yourself with CINAHL Ultimate which is a database with all sorts of articles about nursing, public health, and physical therapy.

CINAHL Ultimate is important because it is routinely used by practicing nurses when they write about their practice. This is especially important for those who want to later earn an advanced nursing degree.

The link below will take you right to CINAHL Ultimate:

Here is a tutorial the library created to help you learn how to access and use CINAHL Ultimate:

Keywords

Keywords are words and phrases used to search electronic databases, web browsers, or AI tools. 

To more easily identify keywords, frame your topic into a statement or question and then select the most important concepts. These are the terms you will use in your search.

For example, in the research question "Are prescription drugs for depression addictive?" the keywords might be:

• "prescription drugs"
• depression
• addictive

Because writers might not use the same words you do it helps to think of some synonyms for your terms, such as:

• medications
• "major depressive disorder"
• "habit-forming" 

Helpful Hints!

1. If you aren't finding enough articles you can make your terms broader:

EX. Instead of ovarian cancer search gynecological cancer

2. Check to see if you're searching for the correct medical term:

EX. Instead of heart attack search Cardiac Infarction

Boolean Operators

Booleans are words that link your keywords together to tell the database how to filter your results.

AND: each individual result must include all terms. Narrows search results by telling the database you only want to see results that use both terms

• drugs AND athletes: Results will include both terms, not just drugs or just athletes

OR: each individual result can include either term. Broadens search results by telling the database that you want to see results that use either term

• colleges OR universities: Useful when searching synonymous terms, or terms that have the same or nearly the same meaning within your topic (saves having to do separate searches)

NOT: excludes terms. Narrows search results by telling the database to exclude the term after the Boolean operator NOT

• cirrhosis NOT alcohol: Will return results about cirrhosis, but not results about alcohol-related cirrhosis

Download LibKey Nomad to streamline resource access

LibKey Nomad is a browser extension that can help streamline your research process and open up even more resources for you. If you are browsing a website that has journal article or ebook citations, LibKey Nomad will detect those you can access through EKU Libraries and provide a link to that article or ebook. You can get library subscribed articles directly from sites such as Wikipedia and Pubmed.

For more information about installing, read the EKU Libraries LibKey Nomad FAQ.