NURS 20010: Interpersonal and Communication Skills For Health Care Professionals: Finding Articles

The term refers to "the validated public literature established to date in the field of Nursing."

Peer review is the process for evaluating artcles before publication.  Journal editors send articles to scholars with similar interests or expertise who evaluate the quality of the research and its contribution to scholarship in the field. The reviewers (also called "referees") make recommendations for publication. 

Research databases are online tools you can use to search for articles. They provide information about articles, books, book reviews, reports, and conference papers appearing in journals, magazines, and newspapers.  Many provide full-text of the articles.  You can read, download, print, or e-mail articles directly from the computer. 

Recommended databases Nursing are

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1. Identify the key concepts related to your topic.
2. Combine key concepts using  Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT.
3. Put quotes around short phrases that represent a single concept-- e.g."body image."
4. Use truncation to search for words with the same root-- e.g.patholog*
5. Evaluate search results to identify new search terms.
6. Refine your search.
7. Perform new searches. 

Use database limit options to narrow searcgh results quickly to meet the requirements of your assignment. 

• Select Core Nursing Journals under Journal Subset to search the nursing literature. 
• Select Research Article and/or Peer-Reviewed under Refine Your Search to limit your results to scholarly research articles.

My EBSCOhost is an option that allows you to set up a personal account that you can use to save searches and search results.  You can set up search alerts and journal alerts and add web pages to your personal folder. 

To begin click the Sign-In tab in the blue bar at the center of the web page displayed.  Then select create a new Account. 

This video shows how to use the Journal Finder to locate online full-text and in-print copies of articles.