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Questions to consider:
You are not alone if you struggle finding relevant and reliable information sources for your course assignments. Most students experience this. The good news is that by practicing a small handful of techniques, you can become a search pro! Let's take a look, starting with this brief video explaining why you probably won't find that one perfect article.
An effective search starts with getting a handle on the scope of the issue(s) involved, and the terminology experts use in the literature. You can save time and effort by spending a little time doing some background reading on your topic. For example, if I have an assignment to write about the impact of nurse burnout on patient safety, a great place to start is to see if Wikipedia might have an entry on this issue and/or one adjacent to it. Reading through such an entry or two would better equip me to understand the scope and history of the issue, as well as understand any relevant terminology. This essential research technique is called background reading.
The next step is to assess what search tools (journal article and ebook databases in the library, websites, etc.) might contain sources relevant to your topic. There are 2 primary ways to search the literature on any topic using the library:
Carry out the searches next to each database listed below. What differences and similarities do you see in the kinds of results you get and in the limit options offered between the multi-disciplinary OneSearch and the discipline-specific CINAHL (CINAHL stands for Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature)?
Once you settle on a search tool, you can construct some searches. Here's some steps to help you do that:
There is no one way to search the literature to find the most important sources related to your topic. However, there are some steps and habits of mind you can use to be more effective and efficient:
Example search in the CINAHL database:
Given the following research question, craft at least 2 different searches using different search words: What impact does nurse cultural competence training have on diabetes patient compliance and outcomes?
Hints: 1. Check this Wikipedia article (and this one) for definitions and possible alternate terminology. 2. Try some searches on OneSearch and/or the CINAHL Plus database to see what might work best.
Submit your searches here and to see some examples of possible searches.
Regardless of the library database you are using, your search results page is going to have many of the same basic features:
If still open, go back to your CINAHL results page (if not, carry out a new search in the CINAHL library database). Now try the following steps with that set of results: