Library Guides: NURS 200W: Principles of Nursing Research and Evidence-Based Practice: Finding & Identifying Articles

Recommended Databases

LionSearch This link opens in a new window
This catch-al tool searches a majority of the databases that the library has in its collection. You can also search for an article's title to see if we have the full-text in our subscriptions!
PubMed (Medline) This link opens in a new window
Provides access to MEDLINE, and other useful resources, from the National Library of Medicine. One of the foundational sources for medical/health research articles!
PubMed is a web interface that allows you to search MEDLINE, the National Library of Medicine's premier database of citations and abstracts for biomedical research articles. The core subject is medicine, but subject coverage also includes bioethics, biology, chemistry, dentistry, environmental health, genetics, gerontology, health care planning and administration, history of medicine, hospital administration, microbiology, nutrition, nursing (International Nursing Index), physiology, pre-clinical sciences, public health, sports medicine, veterinary medicine and zoology. MEDLINE covers over 4,800 journals published in the United States and 70 other countries. The database contains over 15 million citations dating back to 1950. Coverage is worldwide and updated weekly. Learn more about PubMed at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/about/. or Try the Tutorial at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/pubmed_tutorial/m1001.html
CINAHL (Cumulative Index for Nursing and Allied Health) This link opens in a new window
One of the major nursing databases, covering various topics related to the profession.
One of two major databases for nursing, providing references to over 1,800 nursing and allied health journal articles in addition to citations for book chapters, nursing dissertations, association publications, educational software, conference proceedings and selected full-text for state nursing journal articles, legal cases, patient education material, research instruments, standards of practice, critical paths, nurse practice acts, drugs, clinical innovations and government publications. References for alternative/complementary medicine, consumer health and health sciences librarianship are also included. Coverage: 1982 - Present. Updates: Monthly.
PsycINFO (via ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
Resources from APA and other psychology groups. Content overlaps with many popular nursing research topics!
PsycINFO provides access to international literature in psychology and related disciplines. Unrivaled in its depth of psychological coverage and respected worldwide for its high quality, the database is enriched with literature from an array of disciplines related to psychology such as psychiatry, education, business, medicine, nursing, pharmacology, law, linguistics, and social work. Nearly all records contain nonevaluative summaries, and all records from 1967 to the present are indexed using the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms.
Academic Search Complete (Ebsco) This link opens in a new window
A multi-disciplinary database that includes the full text of over 4,400 peer-reviewed journals.
Academic Search Complete is a comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 5,300 full-text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. In addition to full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,300 journals and a total of 10,900 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc. The database features PDF content going back as far as 1865, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format.
Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Along with finding articles on a variety of topics, Web of Science helps you ID seminal articles, and authors, in a discipline or subject area.
Web of Science provides access to: the Science Citation Index Expanded 1900-present; the Social Sciences Citation Index 1956-present; and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index 1975-present. Web of Science indexes articles from thousands of journals and also indexes the citations used in those articles, thus allowing the user to see which papers have cited a core paper, and how many times a paper was cited in a given time period. Covers published content is almost every discipline.
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Allows you to search the web for scholarly material using Google's algorithm.
Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Once you set your institutional preferences, links to full-text, if available at Penn State, should appear.

Identifying Qualitative v. Quantative Research Articles

The research assignment for this course requires you to utilize primary (aka original) research articles. Primary research articles largely fall into 2 categories. The majority of your sources need to be quantitative research articles, so its important to be able identifying them in your search results. The chart below compares the characteristics of quantitative research articles versus qualitative research articles, which is another common type of primary research articles.

What is an primary research article? How does that differ from review or secondary research? More on that in the box below!

Characteristics and Differences of Qualitative and Quantitative Research
Characteristics	Qualitative	Quantitative
Definitions	Investigations which use sensory methods such as listening or observing to gather and organize data into patterns or themes. (CINAHL)	Scientific Investigations in which numbers are used to measure valuables such as characteristics, concepts, or things. (CINAHL)
Word Clues	Ethnographic study Field notes Field research Focus Group Observation Open ended Phenomenological	Case-control study Lab-experiment Clinical trial Cohort studies Control group Experimental group Intervention Randomized-controlled-trial Statistical Structured Questionnaire
Methods	Focus groups Interviews Recording behavior Unstructured observation	Develop hypothesis Determines methodology Collects data Analyzes data Uses mathematical and statistical techniques to analyze data
Search Terms	Qualitative Studies (CINAHL) Qualitative Research (MEDLINE)	Quantitative Studies (CINAHL) MEDLINE uses headings for specific types of quantitative research. See the examples listed under word clues
Data	Ideas Interpretive Narrative description Text-based Words	Measurable Numbers Statistics
Researcher Role	Subjective — involved as a participant observer	Objective — separate, observes, but doesn't participate

This chart comes from the Libraries' Nursing Subject Guide, which contains even more indepth information on comparing these two types of articles!

What about Review articles?

During your research, you will find many articles that do not contain primary (or original) research. These are secondary research articles that review, analyze, or summarize existing research on a topic. Their goal is to place the existing research of a topic into context, and help those interested in the topic to see trends and identify finding supported by multiple studies.

While this type of article is extremely helpful for background understanding in a topic, or identifying foundational articles on a topic, they do not meet the article guidelines for the research project in this course.

Below are some tips to help you identify this articles.

Look at the title
- The title will often contain the words: systematic review, literature review, meta-analysis, critical review, or some other variation of "review."
How is it classified by the database
- Many databases (like PubMed) will use icons or labels to identify the article's type - including whether it is a review article, or the type or primary article
What does the abstract say?
- Look at how the abstract summarizes the article. Do they use phrases like "we reviewed X number of articles from the past X years"?

Not sure if an article is a primary or secondary (review) article? Ask your friendly neighborhood librarian!

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NURS 200W: Principles of Nursing Research and Evidence-Based Practice

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Recommended Databases

Identifying Qualitative v. Quantative Research Articles

Characteristics and Differences of Qualitative and Quantitative Research

What about Review articles?