Subject Research: Nursing:

Subject Research: Nursing

How to start your nursing research:      see also Library Webinar Archives: Nursing

1. Choose your topic, and break it into concepts.
2. Select a Nursing database to begin.
   Note: CINAHL & MEDLINE Combined Search is a great place to start.
3. Type in keywords or search terms related to your topic (one concept per search field).
4. Click Search. 
5. You can now refine your results by using limiters (full text, peer review, publication date, methodology).
6. Or further refine your search by using subject terms and Boolean operators. 
7. Once you have found an article, get the full text. 
   • What if I get zero results?

 Learn more about Library Skills

When working on your literature review, you will read and look at hundreds of articles, books, and other materials. However, you will not include all of them in your final literature review. This does not mean you've wasted your time looking at unnecessary articles! Rather, this review of the literature is what helps you become an expert in your field.

• Scope of the Literature Review
• Search Skills
• Collecting Resources
• Locate Full Text
• Organize Your Literature

Learn more about the Literature Review process

When you begin your search, you will need to determine if you need prepared statistics or raw datasets. The term statistics refers to data that has already been analyzed.

Locating Datasets

If you want to do your own analysis, then you need a dataset. You can find secondary datasets (data that has been collected by someone else) in sources like the ICPSR database (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Science Research Datasets) or the U.S. Census.

• Statistics & Data by Topic: Some data and statistics are available freely online from government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and academic institutions.
• ​ICPSR, which contains raw datasets, is a subscription database that is available through the Office of Research and Doctoral Services.

Data and Statistics in Peer-Reviewed Articles

You can search the Library's research databases for peer-reviewed articles that use statistics to support a position or argument. You may have to try several different searches to find relevant articles. Peer-reviewed articles can be very valuable if you are struggling to locate statistics or data from a government site or database. The Statistics in Articles page includes instructions that show you how to search for articles in the Library's research databases.

Tests and measures are tools that can be used for diagnosing, researching, and assessing phenomena in the social sciences, education, health, and other areas.

Here are the next steps in identifying, searching, and reviewing Tests & Measurements:

• Identify Tests using the Library Databases
• Find Tests in Dissertations
• Find Tests on the Internet
• Reliability & validity

Learn more about Tests & Measures

Evidence-based medicine is defined as "the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients" (Sackett, Rosenberg, Gray, Haynes, & Richardson, 1996). Different research study and resource types provide different quality levels of evidence which you should be aware of as you conduct literature searches. How do you find the highest quality of evidence available in the literature for your clinical question?

Learn how in the following guides:

• Evidence-Based Practice Research Guide
• Levels of Evidence Pyramid