Nursing and Health Professions Research in the Walden Library: Introduction (transcript)

Nursing and Health Professions Library Research: Introduction 

Begin Transcript

Narration: Hi. This is Julie at Walden Library. And, today, I'm going to show you how to get started with medical and health care research here in the Walden Library online.

To access the Walden Library, navigate to the library's home page. You can access in a number of ways. There are links in the student portal and in your classrooms. But you can also go to your favorite browser and just type in library.waldenu.edu anytime from any browser, and it'll redirect to the longer address.

Visual: Walden Library homepage

Narration: The library home page looks like this with a search box at the top, four blue boxes in the middle, and a toolbar here at the top of the page. And there are a couple of things I'd like to point out here for you. First of all, the search box is the Thoreau search. That's what we call our custom search that searches across many disciplines and in different areas. But I personally recommend for almost everybody that you go to your custom area subject page.

Visual: Research by Subject button, then list of subject areas

Narration: And do that by clicking this Research by Subject oval, the darker blue oval in the middle of the page. And then either pick health professions, or nursing, or whatever your program is. Here I'm going to select nursing.

Visual: Nursing Research page

Narration: And you can see my picture here on the left. And then on the right, we have three white boxes.

At the top of the page, we have a gold search box. And this is a custom search that includes many of our best databases. In this case, it includes MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycInfo, SocINDEX, Science Direct, and several others. It's a really great place to start. And each one of the subject area pages has their own custom gold box search with selected databases in it.

And I like to also point out that if you want to do individual databases, you can come to this middle section here and expand the nursing databases bar.

Visual: scrolls down to the Nursing Databases bar

Narration: And that will let you search databases one at a time.

Visual: srolls further down page

And then if you need some help, we do have a whole section on research help at the bottom that includes information on what is in a literature review, how to find statistics and data theories, and things like that.

But I'm going to scroll back up to the top of the page and go to the gold box here. And I like to start with one large topic or concept. And in this case, I'm going to try diabetes. So I type diabetes in the gold box.

And then I'm going to click the little magnifying glass here, or you can hit Enter on your keyboard. That will work as well. And this is where we'll ask you to log in if you haven't logged in yet during this session. Your username and password is exactly the same as it is for the portal. Use your email as your username.

Visual: database search results page. Three rows of search boxes at the top

Narration: I like to start with one big topic like this in the gold box partly because it'll bring up any relevant books of the initial hit list. Like this one here has a couple of books on diabetes. So if I needed some definitions or background information, I could dip into the books and give myself a little bit of information to start with before I do more literature searching.

So this is the results page from our gold box search. And it also has three search boxes here at the top of the page. And this helps a lot because it really does help to keep our concepts separate. And so for this search, the second concept I'd like to add is children. And so when I start typing children or even just child in box number two and then I pause, the database gives me suggestions here below the box of search strings that other people have used.

Visual: pop up list of similar terms below the second search box

Narration: And when you use words with OR in between all inside the same box, that says we will take any of those five words, children, OR adolescents, OR youth, OR child, OR teenager. And so I'm going to add that to our search and click Search again. And that will take our search results from almost two million results down to about 150,000 results. And so that is saying each of these articles has to have diabetes as a concept, and it has to have one of those child or children words as a concept.

And then you can keep modifying these suggestions. So I thought at the end of my children or adolescents to add the word pediatric because we see that a lot in the literature.

Visual: clicks in second row search box to add a term to that box

Narration: Pediatrics spelled the American way or P-A-E-D, spelled the British way. Yes, that's it, paediatric.

So it gives you hints there with the spelling. But they're not always spelled correctly. They're just examples of what other humans have used. So humans are fallible and sometimes make spelling mistakes. So I always double check that. But when it increases our hits here-- we're up to 170,000-- that's great.

Visual: highlights search results number

Narration: Now, why do I need that many hits? Well, I haven't even applied any limits yet. Almost all of the assignments here Walden will ask for you to do research and find articles from peer-reviewed scholarly journals published in the last five years. So there are limits that we can apply to this search to meet the requirements of the assignment. And for that, I'm going to scroll down here in this left light blue column to find this tiny little checkbox that says Peer Reviewed Scholarly Journals Only.

Visual: Limit To section 

Narration: And when I click it, it updates itself, cut out quite a few journals. And then I scroll down to that same area again. And we have articles back to 1923 in here.

And I am going to bring that up to the last five years by typing 2016 into the box and hitting Enter on my keyboard. You can also use this little slider bar if you prefer. But that brought us down from 170,000 results to 51,000 results.

Visual: highlights search results number 

Narration: So we've already narrowed it down quite a bit. And so we can keep going. We can keep adding more concepts.

Visual: clicks in third row search box

Narration: And here I'm going to start typing another concept I'd like to look for, in this case, fast food. So I'm just going to type fast food in box number three and hit Search. And we'll see how many of these 51,000 articles mention fast food. And now we're down to 95. But our limits are still down here. It's still limited to peer-reviewed scholarly journals in the last five years. So this is a manageable number of results.

And you can click the plus sign here beneath the yellow search button and add another row to this search so if you wanted to look for something else inside these 95 results. And this is a great time to use a power tool, one of the things that I use when I have a nice list of results like this and I want to find something very specific. In this case, I'm going to look for the words corn syrup. But I'm not expecting there to be an entire article about corn syrup. I want to see if it's mentioned in any of these 95 articles.

Visual: clicks in fourth row search box

Narration: So after I added the fourth row there by clicking the plus sign, I added the word corn syrup in there. And then I changed the select a  field dropdown to TX, All Text. And that says, look in the full text of these 95 articles for corn syrup. And I hit Search again. And only one left. But that is one.

So this is just showing you kind of a power tool to look within the full text because by default, these EBSCO brand databases are only looking in the title, abstract, and subject headings for your keywords. They don't look in the full text by default. But it can be useful to know how to do that.

Visual: removes 'corn syrup' from fourth row and runs search with just three concepts

Narration: So let's go back one to a larger list of results. When you see the Find at Walden button-- this is a teal blue Find at Walden instance. Occasionally you'll see it typed out as well. But when you see that, it thinks that we have that article in another database.

So when I click it, it checks our other databases and says, Oh, I think we have it in several of them.

Visual: clicked on Find at Walden to get to screen listing several databases and subscription coverage years. 

And so I go and I have to click again to get to the full text. And sometimes this can require a little bit of persistence. But it did come up to the full text. And then I have a download PDF option over here.

Visual: ProQuest page with article options, pdf option is in the upper part of the screen

Narration: Since I clicked the Find at Walden button, it opened in a new tab.

Visual: database search results page 

Narration: So I can go back over to my hit list here. And you'll see that some of them have the PDF full text right there available on that page. Shouldn't be any problem to click on that and open it up.

It does open in the same window. So if you want to keep browsing your results, you can right click on this and open in a new tab. And that will let you keep looking at the results while that opens up in another tab.

Visual:  Right clicks on PDF full text icon to open PDF in new tab.

Narration: These Find at Walden links don't always work out perfectly. It's kind of a moving target. And we try to stay on top of them as much as possible. But sometimes it just doesn't work and there may be a zero results here. Or you may click on the link and it just doesn't go anywhere. You get an error message or something like that.

Visual: clicking on different Find at Walden buttons to demonstrate different screens

And if you are working on an assignment or a discussion post, I would just go and find another article. If it is the perfect article for you and it's going to change your life, then you can come up to the Ask a Librarian button that's here in the database but is also here on our library pages.

Visual: Ask a Librarian page 

Narration: And when you click Ask a Librarian, you can send us an email and give us the citation that you are looking to get and just tell us that you can't get the full text for it. And we will do our best to find it.

Sometimes we have to go through the journals. Sometimes we just don't have access yet because it is on a delay. There's a number of things that could be happening. But let us know, and we'll see what we can do to help. If you email us, we will get back to you within 24 hours.

Let's pop back over to our PowerPoint. And let's review a little bit. We chose the nursing research page. But you can also choose health professions or psychology and see some other collections of resources.

Visual: image of Research by Subject page and list of subjects

Narration: On the Research home itself, I recommend starting in this gold box at the top of the page. But if you'd like some individual databases, there is links to those under nursing databases in the middle. And don't forget about the research help all the way at the bottom of the page.

So when you start with the gold box, try to start with one large word or concept. When you get to the results screen, do pay attention to any suggestions that the database offers. But don't feel bound to those. You can use your own list of words. You can come up-- you can add words as you are moving along. And don't forget to apply limits.

Visual: image of Limit To section from EBSCO database

Narration: In the EBSCO brand databases, they look like this blue box when you scroll down in the left light blue column. And then you can check the Peer Reviewed Scholarly Journals Only box in 2016 to present at this time. And then when you get to full text, sometimes it requires another couple of clicks.

Visual: examples of Find at Walden, HTML full Text, and PDF Full text  as images or words

Narration: If you see the Find at Walden button, go ahead and click it and click through and try to find your PDF full-text buttons. And they do have quite a few different looks. So I gave you a couple of examples here.

If you are getting stumped and you're just not having a lot of luck, make sure you've checked your spelling. Sometimes that can be a definite hindrance in the search process. And it does not automatically correct you here. So start broadly with one term or keyword. Don't put all of your words in one box like you do with Google. It just doesn't work that well here.

Use synonyms with OR in between. And don't forget to repeat as necessary. If you're not successful at first, try adjusting your words. Try taking out some words. Try different words. Don't get too wedded to one particular way of describing something, and you'll be able to find a lot more things along the way.

So we do have some big search options. As I mentioned, if you search Thoreau, which is our largest combined database from the library homepage, it searches across all of our disciplines and in many general sources. If you go to the gold box search on your subject research page, that will be more focused with databases that are relevant to your topic area. And then you can always go to individual databases as well.

And when you are stumped, do click Ask a Librarian. Send us questions. We have chat hours almost every day. But you can email us any time. And we do answer emails on the evenings and weekends.

Visual: Quick Answers button and search page

Narration: And then we have Quick Answers here that is a great way to get kind of a self-help for yourself to find things about peer review or technical assistance. We've got all kinds of topics in here and thousands of results not just from the library but also from the Writing Center and the Academic Skills Center. And you can get to our Quick Answers like this from the Get Help section of our web page or anywhere you see the word Quick Answers.

So let us know how we can help you. And good luck on your journey. Thanks a lot.

 

Created May 2021 by Walden University Library

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