Find Articles - Nursing and Nurse Practitioners - Guides de recherche

Overview

Finding relevant articles for your research project can be challenging. To overcome some of these challenges, explore the contents below:

Learn how to write a more efficient search strategy using search operators.
Explore key databases to locate your articles.
Try subject heading and keyword searching in Medline with the help of a video tutorial.
Follow the steps to retrieve full-text articles.

Search operators

Use search operators to develop a more efficient search strategy. Common ones are listed below.

Quotation marks -- " "

e.g. "public health" (will retrieve documents that contain this exact phrase)

Boolean operators -- AND, OR,

e.g. diabetes AND children (will retrieve documents that contain both keywords)

e.g. diabetes OR children (will retrieve documents that contain one or both keywords)

Truncation -- *

e.g. Canad* (will retrieve documents that contain Canada, Canadian, Canadians, canadien, etc.)

Wildcards -- ?

e.g. wom?n (will retrive documents that contain woman or women)

Boolean Logic and Special Characters Guide
This handout will help you understand how to use boolean operators in a database search and show you examples of different special characters you can use to improve your database searches.

Key databases

Below, are key databases that can be used to locate articles on your research topic.

Depending on your topic, consider browsing other research guides to help identify other relevant databases.

CINAHL (EBSCO) » Ce lien s'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre / This link opens in a new window
CINAHL is the authoritative resource for nursing and allied health professionals, students, educators and researchers. This database provides indexing for 2,928 journals from the fields of nursing and allied health. The database contains more than 1,000,000 records dating back to 1981.
Medline (Ovid) » Ce lien s'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre / This link opens in a new window
Ovid MEDLINE covers the international literature on biomedicine, including the allied health fields and the biological and physical sciences, humanities, and information science as they relate to medicine and health care. Information is indexed from approximately 3,900 journals published world-wide.
EMBASE » Ce lien s'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre / This link opens in a new window
The Excerpta Medica database (EMBASE) is a major biomedical and pharmaceutical database indexing over 3,500 international journals.
Nursing & Allied Health Premium » Ce lien s'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre / This link opens in a new window
Provides full text journals, scholarly literature, clinical training videos, reference materials, and evidence-based resources to support the study of the many aspects of nursing or the allied health professions, including physical therapy, rehabilitation radiography, dietetics, dental hygiene, and the clinical laboratory sciences. The clinical skills videos cover important topics such as health care safety, mental health, emergency planning, checking vital signs, and more.
APA PsycInfo (OVID) » Ce lien s'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre / This link opens in a new window
Includes journal articles, books, book chapters, dissertations and government reports in psychology and related disciplines.
Education Source » Ce lien s'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre / This link opens in a new window
Education Source is intended for students in education as well as educational professionals and policymakers. The collection includes journals, books, and conference papers. Education Source also contains citations for over 4 million articles including book reviews. Coverage spans all educational levels (early childhood to post-secondary) and includes information on sub-specialities such as health education, ESL and assessment and evaluation.

Video Tutorial

Learn how to search Medline(Ovid) more efficiently by:

locating and using subject headings,
using keywords,
applying limits.

Get full-text articles

Finding full-text articles can be challenging. The steps below may be helpful. Try the first step and if unsuccessful, proceed to the next and so forth.

Begin your search in OMNI, the library's catalogue, to ensure you are accessing resources via the proxy server. All e-journal access is controlled by IP recognition and the proxy server (especially when accessing resources from off-campus) facilitates recognition.
- Access full-text articles from the provide link of your search results, if available. If it is not available try the steps below.
If you are using a citation manager, such as Zotero or Endnote ensure that you have the "retrieve full-text" functionality installed. See citation manger libguide for details. If this functionality is set up:
- Add the your article to the citation manager, it should either retrieve the full-text automatically or
- You will have to manually use the "retrieve full-text" functionality (in Zotero it is called "library lookup".)
Search for the article title in Google Scholar/Google
Check the E-Journals (A-Z) list for journal title. If your journal title is found:
- Follow the steps to go the journal's webpage
- Look for the volume and issue of the article
- Search for the title of the article
Put in a request to get the article via inter-library loan
- Register for an account and the submit your request