Introduction
Welcome to the Walden Library! This guide is designed to teach you how to find the resources that you need to complete your Week 3 assignment. You are asked to find a current article that describes the impact of nursing on health care quality as viewed through the Magnet professional model. This guide provides step-by-step instructions for accessing a health-related database in the Library and retrieving a recent article on this topic. Specifically, after reviewing this guide, you will be able to:
- access nursing resources in the Walden Library
- access the CINAHL Plus with Full Text database
- search using effective keywords
- retrieve recent, peer-reviewed articles
- develop skills and strategies for finding the best evidence
If you are new to the Walden Library, you can watch the following video to help you become familiar with all that the Library has to offer:
Nursing and Health Library research help videos
Access Nursing Resources
The Library offers a variety of resources geared specifically to nursing students. Here is how you can access them:
1. On the Library homepage, go to the Research by Subject box.
2. Click on Research by Subject and choose: Nursing.
3. This is the Library's main Nursing Research page. Here you can access:
- Nursing & health databases, which contain peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed journal articles.
- Nursing theory resources
- Sources for health statistics
- Evidence-based practice resources
- Walden Library Levels of Evidence Pyramid
Break the topic into keywords
Library databases that search for peer-reviewed articles cannot understand complex phrases like the topic: "the impact of nursing on health care quality as viewed through the Magnet professional practice model."
Instead, we need to break down the topic into just keywords and type each concept or keyword into a separate search box in the database as demonstrated in the search below.
What keywords should we use? The main ideas in the topic are:
nursing
health care
quality
Magnet professional practice model
However, even these phrases and words are too specific to get results in most of our Nursing databases. We need to be even broader and just use this combination of words:
nursing
quality
Magnet
Search for a recent article
Many of the Library databases, including CINAHL Plus with Full Text, have a special limiter so that your searches return only peer-reviewed articles. They also allow you to set a date limit for your search.
Here is a search that you can do in the CINAHL Plus with Full Text database to find peer-reviewed articles from the last five years with our keywords for this topic.
1. When you are on the Nursing Research page, scroll down until you see a section called Nursing databases.
Note: For more information on accessing the Nursing Research page, please see the access nursing resources instructions above.
2. Click on Nursing databases and then click on the link for CINAHL Plus with Full Text to access the database.
Note: If you have not already logged in to the Library databases, you will be prompted to log in with your myWalden Portal user name and password.
3. Now you are on a search screen with three Search boxes.
In the top search box type:
nursing
In the middle search box type:
quality
In the bottom search box type:
magnet
Your search boxes will look like this:
4. To limit your results to only full-text, peer-reviewed articles, go below the search boxes and click in the boxes under Full Text and Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals.
Note: Many Library databases include citations for articles that they don't have in full text, meaning the full article isn't available. Limiting your results to only full text will ensure that all of the articles you find will be available.
5. To limit your results to only the last five years, go further down on the page. Under Published Date enter the year range that you want.
In the first Year box, enter the year that was five years ago. For example:
2017
Leave the second Year box empty and the search will default to the current year.
Note: You also don't have to fill out the months, they will default to January and the current month respectively.
6. Then click on the Search button to run your search.
7. That should give you a list of peer-reviewed articles from the last five years on your topic.
8. Once you identify an article that looks interesting, click on the PDF Full Text link to open the article.
To learn more about picking appropriate keywords, please see our guide: