Library Research Tutorial
Selected nursing journals at BU
Browse nursing journals for ideas on your topic. Search Publication Finder for more.
General Research Journals
Specialized Nursing Journals
Using PubMed in Evidence-Based Practice
- Using PubMed in Evidence-Based PracticeDeveloped by the National Library of Medicine, this tutorial introduces practitioners to PubMed.
For AHII, you will complete the section on "Use PubMed to Find Relevant Articles", with 4 subsections:
(1) Perform a PubMed Search
(2) Connect Search Terms to MeSH Terms
(3) Filter PubMed Search Results
(4) Perform a Clinical Queries Search and Filter Results
Getting started
Browse these online web resources for a potential research topic.
- Advance for NursesOpen access (free) to this trade publication for nursing. Good source for continuing education, jobs, etc.
- Google ScholarUse Google's search engine for "scholarly literature" to find subscribed sources on and off-campus. Go to Menu>Settings>Library Links to enable Bloomsburg University links to view subscribed resources. Look for "FullText@BloomU" links.
- Search Everything @ BUSearch across most of the library's databases and its catalog, and then use filters to narrow your search.
Going Deeper - Using library databases for topic selection
Library databases have filters that can narrow or broaden a search. They use 'controlled vocabulary,' which means they assign descriptors or subjects to articles. For example in the database PubMed, all articles about heart attacks are assigned the subject 'Myocardial Infarction.'
In addition, PubMed as well as CINAHL and other databases have filters that can limit your search results. For example, you can apply filters to limit results to specific types of studies, nursing journals, English-language, last five years, adult population, and so on.
You can access some of these databases on the library's main website, on the Finding Articles tab for this guide, or by the links below.
- PubMedPubMed, a free National Library of Medicine database, includes over 27 million citations for biomedical articles back to the 1950's.
- CINAHL CompleteThe Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature database indexes more than 5,300 journals and provides full text for 1,400 journals. Includes research instruments, clinical trials, and continuing education modules.
- MEDLINE CompleteProvides full text for over 1,800 medical journals, and abstracts from over 5,400 current biomedical journals indexed by the National Library of Medicine.