NR 345: Professional Nursing Practice Child

• Start with just one or two keywords, then add limiters and additional keywords (if needed)
  • Usually it's best not to include search words like "nursing" or "patient." CINAHL is a nursing database, so just about everything is about nursing and patient care!
• Limiters (click "show more" under the date range limiter bar to the left of your results list):
  • Published date: adjust range to limit to past 5 years
  • English language (checkbox)
  • Research article (checkbox)
    • This limiter does not necessarily limit to research study articles, but it does eliminate content that is not research at all (newsletters, book reviews, etc.)
  • Journal subset: Core Nursing
    • Select this limiter for results published only in scholarly (peer reviewed) nursing journals
    • Ursuline Library has online full-text access to almost all of the journals in CINAHL's Core Nursing collection
  • Any author is a nurse (checkbox)
    • Try some searches with and without this limiter. Sometimes it eliminates articles that really do have a nurse author!
• Do not overuse limiters! Sometimes they don't do what you think they will do. For example, the "Evidence-Based Practice" limiter in CINAHL eliminates most primary research articles and limits results to a small collection of highly specialized journals.

Bonus tips:

• To broaden/expand results, consider synonyms and combine them with OR: heart OR coronary OR cardiac
• Use truncation to include variant endings: therap* = therapy OR therapies OR therapeutic
• Use quotation marks to bind keywords into a phrase like "chronic pain"
• Lots of results? Try adding the keyword random* to zero in on primary research studies using random sampling or control groups

Other ways to find the full-text of an article:

• PDF Full Text Link
• Find It! button connects to full text where it resides in another database 
• Don't see a PDF Full Text link or Find it! button? Or perhaps the Find it! button didn't work properly? Try searching for the journal title (i.e. American Journal of Nursing) in Journal Finder.
• Still can't find the full-text?! Submit an Article Request form. We can often provide full-text access right away. If we can't, we will request the article through interlibrary loan (ILL).