Healthcare Librarian
Search Tips
Try these tips:
- Brainstorm a variety of keywords (poverty, low-income, income level, social class)
- To Narrow search: Connect keywords with and (poverty and education and achievement)
- Use quotes to search for a phrase ("social inequality")
- To Broaden search: Use or to search synonyms (poverty or low-income and education)
- Search by keywords, not sentences (poverty and "secondary education" and achievement instead of effect of poverty on high school students)
- Use * to get different endings of a root word (school* searches for school, schools, schooling)
- Look for subject terms or descriptors; use these terms to find more articles on your topic
Article Databases
The library has access to several medical databases. See the description of each to further direct your research.
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CINAHL
A large research database for nursing and allied health literature. Lots of full text, cited reference lists, author affiliation info, evidence-based care sheets, and more. -
PubMed MEDLINE
PubMed, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, contains over 17 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals. Coverage goes back to the 1950s. PubMed also includes links to full-text articles and MeSH subject headings. -
AgeLine
Contains articles, reports, and information about older adults and aging. Useful for gerontology nursing searches. -
Academic Search Premier
Not nursing specific, but does have some nursing journals. Suggested use would be for more general-interest topics. For example, public response to ebola crisis. -
ERIC (EBSCOhost)
Huge education database. Includes nursing eduation journals. A great place to look for articles on educational approaches, such as simulation or mentoring/precepting, which are used in nursing. -
PsycINFO
Focuses on psychology and related fields. Many questions about mental illness, caregiving, quality of life, satisfaction, depression, grief, etc. would be addressed in this database. -
ScienceDirect Journals
Science Direct is one of the largest collections (2 million articles and 40 million abstracts) of science, technology, and medical information. -
Google Scholar
Take a Google approach to scholarly searching. Searches many, many articles, but does not provide access to articles other than those available for free online.
