Beginner's Research Guide | searching steps
Searching the literature of nursing and health care is best done by taking the following steps:
- Phrase your information need in the form of a question
- Decide what kind of information you are looking for:
- Information in scholarly journal articles
- Information in popular periodicals such as The New York Times
- Information that has been aggregated from many sources (such as a textbook)
- Ready reference information: a fact, a definition, a short description, drug side effect, etc
- Are you interested in the historical, ethical, psychosocial, or policy aspects of the topic, or the biomedical aspects of the topic?
- Decide how much you are looking for--are you looking for several recent articles on a topic? Are you writing a paper and looking for both background information from textbooks plus some recent journal information? Are you writing a dissertation? What level of evidence do you require? Information in a journal article is not necessarily ready for clinical application.
Once you have answered these questions you will be ready to:
- locate books
- select a database to locate journal articles by topic
