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Nursing & Health Sciences: NUS 314

Welcome!

Welcome to NUS314: Scholarly Inquiry in Evidence-Based Nursing Practice. This course introduces students to the process of using scholarly inquiry to generate new knowledge and support evidence-based nursing practice. The course focuses on preparing students to become critical consumers of nursing and healthcare research, utilize best current evidence in nursing practice, and develop an understanding of the research process necessary for contemporary evidence-based nursing practice and graduate study. 

This guide provides information curated to the academic needs of students in NUS 314, as research is an essential component. Browse the resources available, and if you have any issues or questions, please contact the Research & Instruction Librarian reference@annamaria.edu for assistance, pop down to the library during open hours, or schedule an appointment to meet with a librarian. 

Database Research

Finding articles with specific requirements (peer-review, publication date, etc.) can be difficult in a general Google search, but is made easier through searching in academic databases. The library subscribes to and recommends a variety of databases for nursing research, hosted on the library's website. If you are off campus, you will need your library number (back of student ID) and password (last name in all caps) to sign in to most databases. For research in NUS 314, we recommend CINAHL and Google Scholar alongside other nursing/health sciences databases. Read the descriptions to determine if the database is a good fit for your assignment and topic. 

Nurse As Author

You are required to find articles where at least one nurse is a credited author. How can you tell if a nurse is one of the authors? If you're searching in CINAHL, use the filter for Any Author As Nurse, which you'll find below the filter for peer-review. If you're searching in a database that doesn't have that kind of filter, check the names listed under Author and see which ones have nursing credentials (look them up on Google if you're not sure). Authors can typically be found at the top or bottom of an article. If you're online, sometimes names will link you to a short bio of the authors, which should tell you their educational backgrounds.

Professional Nursing Journals

You are required to find articles that are published in professional nursing journals. You can typically determine this if the word nurse or nursing is in the title. You can also look up the title of the journal and read their about section - it will give you more context and information about the scope of the publication. 

Helpful Definitions

Qualitative: Information and concepts in data that are not represented by numbers. This tends to be data gathered from interviews, focus groups, surveys, printed materials, lab notes, or observations. Qualitative data can be analyzed through methods like data coding, which transforms raw collected data into a set of categories to describe essential concepts. 

Quantitative: Data that can be represented numerically (think "quantity"). This includes information that can be counted, measured, or given a value with numbers. Quantitative data are often analyzed with statistics.  

Peer-review: Peer review, also known as "refereed", describes a process that some scholarly articles undergo where a team of academics and experts in a field read over a paper and offer suggestions to improve it before publication in a journal. This is done to ensure that published articles are accurate, high quality, and useful to the academic discourse. 

Literature review: A document or section of a document which collects key sources on a topic and discusses those sources in conversation with each other. A literature review can be used to support an academic paper or as part of the research process to identify gaps in research. 

Annotated bibliography: A bibliography which includes a summary or annotation of each source. Annotated bibliographies are often a starting point for doing research on a topic, and are helpful in determining if there is enough research to continue. 

 

Finding Peer-Review Articles

The Mondor-Eagen Library curates a selection of databases that contain peer-reviewed articles. Note that very few of the databases contain exclusively peer-reviewed content, so it's important to choose your database wisely. On the databases page, filter the list by Database Type, select Peer-reviewed. You can filter your results further by selecting the dropdown for Subject and selecting a relevant subject. Read the descriptions for each database, and choose appropriately for your research needs. Once inside the database you will likely need to select Peer review as a search filter, otherwise all results will contain a mix of peer-reviewed and non-peer reviewed material.

If you are searching for peer reviewed articles in Google Scholar, note that there is no filter for peer-review. You should be able to verify if an article is peer-reviewed in a few easy steps. Any peer-reviewed article should have some indicator that it has undergone the peer-review process, whether it is at the top of the page alongside publisher or author information or in the official website of the publishing journal under the "About" section.

  • For example, if the article was published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine, one could Google the title of the journal, follow the link to the journal's official website, select the "About" tab, and look for a description of the journal. 
  • When in doubt, ask a librarian! Contact reference@annamaria.edu for assistance.

Mondor-Eagen Library | Anna Maria College
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