LibGuides: Evidence Based Practice Guide for Nursing Students: Search

Databases

PubMed This link opens in a new window
Medical indexing/full-text database that provides public access to MEDLINE (see separately) and full-text on PubMed Central and other publisher websites. On the NCBI platform.
CINAHL Complete [Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature] This link opens in a new window
Major nursing indexing/full-text database that covers journal articles back to 1981. On the EBSCOhost platform.
Nursing and Allied Health Database This link opens in a new window
Biomedical indexing/full-text database that covers journals, eBooks, media, reference books and theses back to 1986. On the ProQuest platform.
Cochrane Library This link opens in a new window
Medical indexing/full-text database that provide systematic reviews, controlled trials, methodology register, reviews of effects, health technology assessment and economic evaluations. On a Wiley platform.

Saving searches

Each database has their own process for saving searches. Below are some ways to save searches:

Saving and Managing Searches in PubMed
The Saved Searches feature facilitates saving search queries for NCBI databases, and provides automatic e-mail updates for saved searches, which can be set up on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Saving searches in CINAHL
CINAHL is an EBSCOhost database and this tutorial will demonstrate how to create folders to save searches and results in the database platform.

If you are organizing a large number of resources and citations, you can use a citation management tool. This can help you save the articles you find and quickly create citations and bibliographies based on those articles.

Zotero
Zotero is a free, open access citation management tool. It's easy to use, connects with your web browser to download sources, and best of all it's free.

Zotero allows you to attach PDFs, notes and images to your citations, organize them into collections for different projects, and create bibliographies.

EndNote Basic This link opens in a new window
Web-based service to store bibliographic citations and output them in various standard formats. Part of UW's Web of Science platform.

Library Search/Retrieval Options

UW Libraries QuickSearch: includes the collections of the University Libraries, UW Law Library, and the American Heritage Center.

Prospector: a unified catalog of twenty-three academic, public and special libraries in Colorado and Wyoming. UW students, faculty and staff can borrow materials from Prospector.

Interlibrary Loan: UW students, faculty and staff can request books, journal volumes, journal articles and other materials, regardless of whether it is available in the UW Libraries, online or in libraries around the world. A free service!

Subject Headings

MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) is the NLM controlled vocabulary thesaurus used for indexing articles for PubMed.

Using the subject headings can help you search more efficiently in the PubMed database. An advantage of controlled vocabularies, like MeSH, is that a single term has been used to represent a particular concept no matter how it was referred to in the original article.

MeSH searching

The CINAHL subject headings are based on the MeSH headings, with additional specific nursing and allied health headings added as appropriate. Each year, the headings are updated and revised relative to terminology needed in these fields. In addition, new terms from MeSH may be added as well.

CINAHL Complete [Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature] This link opens in a new window
You can find the CINAHL Subject Headings on the top blue bar on the database page.

Search Tips

Too few articles?

Use fewer search terms, or swap out for synonyms.
Borrow the subject terms coming up in the sidebar.
Truncate keywords to get all variations of the word (e.g. "censor*" searches for censor, censored, censorship, and censors).

Too many articles?

Be more precise (e.g. basketball instead of sports).
Add an additional keyword.
Refine your search using the facets like publication type, date range, or subject headings.

Still need help? Ask a Librarian!

Search QuickSearch Scopes

UW Libraries QuickSearch: includes the collections of the University Libraries, UW Law Library, and the American Heritage Center. Searches almost everything.

Use this QuickSearch link to search Books, E-Books & Media.

Lastly, use this QuickSearch link to search Course Reserves.