Finding Nursing Literature to Support Your Research Paper or Care Plan

Follow these steps for locating quality information:

Define an information need in its context, whether it be in a clinical or research situation, separating out information you don't know. Example case:

You are a school nurse who regularly visits a number of elementary and middle schools (children aged 5 to 13 years) in your region. It is cold and flu season once again. One of the teachers stops you in the hall to ask you a question about his 10- year old daughter who also has a cold. He has heard that zinc lozenges can help to relieve cold symptoms and wonders if they really do work and if it is OK to give them to children.

Formulate an answerable question about the information that you are looking for.

In children with colds are zinc lozenges safe and effective for relief of cold symptoms?

Select the searchable terms from your question:

zinc

child

cold

Think of synonyms and related terms:

lozenges

zinc acetate or zinc gluconate

Cold Eze

common cold or rhinovirus

children or youths

Identify available resources and choose appropriate search tools.If you want to know if Hopkins owns a book or journal, search the JHU Libraries Catalog. To find journal articles, enter the searchable terms in Welch online databases and indexes through the Welch Digital Library Gateway.

You might start with searching PubMed (MEDLINE) and CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature). A great place to find Nursing and Allied Health e-databases, e-journals, and e-books is the Nursing Electronic Resources Subject Guide.

Develop a search strategy employing limits that filter out unwanted or irrelevant information. Use controlled vocabulary where possible to increase relevant retrieval. Review your search techniques for unsatisfactory searches. Examine initial search results for additional search ideas.
Truncate terms to pick up plurals (eg. injur* for injury, injuries, injured). Think about spelling variations (tumor or tumour). Combine terms with or without using a Boolean Operator (AND, OR, NOT).
Select from your search result, those items appropriate to your question/problem and locate articles either in print or online. Here are a few tips on locating full-text resources through the Welch Medical Library:

If the databases do not provide a link to the full-text of the article, see if the journal is listed on the Full-Text Journals page.
Some journals are not available electronically. Therefore, check the JHU Libraries Catalog to see if a Hopkins library owns the journal so that you can retrieve the article, photocopy the article, or request it through Interlibrary Loan (Weldoc).
Additional full-text resources can be found by searching nursing databases from EBSCOhost.
You may also browse through other subjects on the e-Resources by Subject page for other topic areas of interest.
There are over 2400 full-text books on the Full-Text Books page.
Quality nursing Web sites are listed on the Nursing Resources page.

Evaluate your information for quality considering the following questions:
- Who wrote it?
- Who sponsored the research?
- What institutional or organizational affiliation exists?
- When was it published?
- Has it been reviewed? By whom?
- Why was it published?
- Has it been cited? Whom does it cite?
- Is the information valid? (critique the study design)
- How useful is the information for your particular clinical or research problem?

updated 9/12/2008 by Stella Seal