Finding nursing journal articles

llg, PhD, RN · Feb 4, 2013

1. Does your school have a library? A good school will have a decent library. If you go to a school that has a library, that should be your first stop. Talk to the librarian ... take a tour of the facility ... do the online tutorials ... whatever. The library (and the librarian) should be a great resource for you.

2. Use a nursing data base (such as CINAHL or OVID) and not just Google or Google Scholar. It's OK to use those other, general data bases ... but you have to understand that they just do general searches and do not tap into many of the professional journals. You will benefit more by searching the professional journals and not just the ones that are available for free to the general publich.

3. Don't assume that articles exist on a topic just because you want articles to exist. Nursing scholarship is not widespread. There are many topics within nursing about which very little (of quality) is written.

4. I recommend to students writing papers, doing projects, etc. to start with just a general topic in mind ... then skim the professional literature to see what has been written on a topic before narrowing your focus. Too many students start with a very specific topic and then struggle as they discover that very little has ever been written on it. Choose a specific topic AFTER you have searched the literature and identified a topic that has the literature available to support it.

nurseprnRN, BSN, RN · Feb 4, 2013

Your school's librarian will probably also have access to the paid subscription services (like CINAHL) and you won't have to pay for the articles in them. Your community public library might too, and you can get things for free on interlibrary loan.

Learn to love your librarian, because s/he is a professional at doing just what you are asking: searching out information.