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NRS 420: Evidence-Based Literature Reseach: Nursing Databases & Books

Find Guidelines and Systematic Reviews

PubMed

A free, comprehensive, medical journal literature database from the National Library of Medicine (NLM). This link includes the Elmhurst College Find it! button, which will help users locate resources available through the College.  PubMed is available independent of Elmhurst College-based subscriptions. It includes multiple levels of evidence-based literature, and is an essential resource for Nursing research.

To see additional filters in PubMed, you must first perform a search. In the search results page, you'll see these limiters (more are available than what's visible). Useful categories to limit by would be:

  • Article types
  • Text availability
  • Journal categories
  • Publication dates

To see full text availability, click on an article citation and look for the Elmhurst College "FindIt" button in the upper right-hand corner. This button will open another screen and attempt to direct you to the Elmhurst-owned full-text article, if we have it. Also, the "LinkOut" feature can link to Elmhurst resources (but this feature does not automatically link you to the full-text; Elmhurst has to subscribe to the database).

  • In addition to the Pubmed database, you can also select "Books" from the list next to the search box to browse publications and materials not included in a standard PubMed search.

National Guideline Clearinghouse
The U.S. Department of Heath and Human Service's comprehensive public database of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and related documents. There are links provided for full-text versions of guidelines, where available.

Primary Nursing Databases with EBL content

To search for research articles published in nursing journals, scroll down to the "Limit your results" section, and consider the following limiters:

  • Published Date 
  • English Language 
  • Peer Reviewed 
  • Research Article 
  • Evidence-Based Practice
  • Any Author is a Nurse 
  • Journal Subset: Nursing
  • Geographic Subset: USA

 

To look for research articles, you can add the following search phrases in a search box:

  • randomized controlled trials
  • quantitative research
  • research

Search for these terms as a subject using the drop down menu to the right of the search boxes. You can use multiple terms by separating them with the OR operator (in the box to the left of the search boxes).

Click on the "Advanced Search" tab and scroll down to "Search Options"- set the following parameters:

  • Under the "Subject subset" menu select "Systematic Reviews" or... Under the "Publication type" menu select "Randomized Controlled Trial"

Other Related Databases

Click on the "Advanced Search" tab and scroll down to "Search Options"- set the following parameters:

  • Under the "Methodology" menu select "Empirical Research" and/or "Mathematical Model".  (NOTE: Systematic Reviews can also be found here)

Although you can't specifically search for research articles, you'll want to limit your search search for full-text items we have access to. Limit your search on the Search tab to "Subscribed journals." 

Citation Linker

If you have a journal or book citation and you want to see if we have the full-text in print or electronic versions, click on the Citation Linker.

On this screen, enter as much of the citation infomation as you can. If we have the book or journal in our collection, you'll be given a link to that item. 

Note- if we do not have the article, you can always order it via interlibrary loan.

Books