Undergraduate Nursing Resources

These two videos should be watched before the Sciences Librarian's first visit to NUR 3112.  (Usually week 3)

Use the Database Investigation Table (two pages; link below) as a guide notes page when investigating these databases. 

Think like a Scientist as you try out the databases! What subjects appear to be covered in this database? Did something unexpected happen when you searched (e.g. expected to get more or fewer results)?   What happens in you try different terms or limiter options?  Are there any special advanced search features?

Boolean Operators, Truncation and Parentheses:

Boolean Logic: watch this short video on Boolean operators (e.g. AND; OR or NOT)

• AND means that both ideas must be present (makes for more narrow results) - Fungi and Cancer
• OR means that either idea may be present (makes for broader results) - Fungi OR Mushrooms
• NOT means that on idea will be excluded from the results (make for more narrow results) - (Fungi OR Mushrooms) NOT Yeast

Parentheses: using parenthesis along with Boolean operators can help the database know what results you want (read the Boolean operators in the correct order).

• This search, Cancer AND Fungi OR Mushrooms, will return articles about cancer and fungi and articles about mushrooms
• This search, cancer AND (Fungi OR Mushrooms), will return articles about cancer and fungi and articles about cancer and mushrooms

In the EBSCO databases I will usually put synonyms in the same box with an OR and different concepts each in their own box (the boxes effectively work as parentheses in the search:

Truncation symbols: most databases allow the use of * to truncate a word.  In searching it will return results for any word that starts with the characters you enter for example: nurs* = nurse, nurses, nursing, and nursery (this can be very helpful if a word has multiple endings, but also note that this last word, nursery, actually has a different meaning than the rest, so sometimes truncating can bring in some irrelevant results.

As your last step in investigating the databases,  find a research article on either Safe Patient Handling or Falls Prevention. Format using APA 7th edition and turn in on Canvas under the assignment "Safety Article Search and Summary" 

These are the questions you will need to answer:

1. Your name and your partner's name
2. The names of the databases you investigated, and something new you learned about searching.
3. The safety topic you were interested in.
4. The search terms and process you and your partner used.
5. How did you know it was a research or clinical practice article?
6. The article reference per APA criteria

When answering about your search terms and process question, please be thoughtful and thorough, For example (using a completely different database and topic):

I did a search in Biological Abstracts for (fungi and bioactive compounds), and then when I was looking through them several were on cancer, so I added that to my search instead of bioactive compounds:

(fungi and breast cancer) - there were 319 results, next I decided to broaden out fungi and also search for mushrooms

((fungi or mushroom) and breast cancer) -  462 results, looking through these results, I realized that while they had the words fungi or mushroom in the record, they weren't really looking at the fungi as a bioactive compound, so I decided to add that back in

((fungi or mushroom) and (bioactive or biologically active) and breast cancer) - 49 results, this seemed reasonable, so i decided to use limiters to bring my number of results down more

so using the above search I limited my results to the last 5 years - 30 results
then I said the word Cancer had to be in the title of the article - 11 results
of these 11 - many were available via full-text through Google Scholar, so I had my pick of articles and decided on this one.

This video will lead you step by step through creating and APA Journal Article reference: