Nursing and Medical Research

Finding Articles

Top

Journal articles are the primary way nursing and medical research is disseminated. Start with the following databases:

Academic Search Premier via EBSCOhost
This database helps you find articles in some of the leading nursing and medical journals. It is multidisciplinary and very up-to-date.

CINAHL Plus with Full Text via EBSCOhost
If you are doing any kind of nursing research, then you need to search CINAHL. This database covers nursing, biomedicine, health sciences librarianship, alternative/complementary medicine, consumer health and 17 allied health disciplines. It contains article citations for more than 3,000 journals from the fields of nursing and allied health back to 1937. There is full text for about 770 journals.

Nursing Journals @ Ovid
Provides full-text access to 60 nursing journals. Also provides indexing and abstracting for more than a thousand medical, nursing and other health-related journals.

MEDLINE via PubMed
The most comprehensive medical database in the world is MEDLINE, which covers the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and the preclinical sciences. MEDLINE contains bibliographic citations and author abstracts from more than 4,800 biomedical journals published in the United States and 70 other countries. The file contains over 12 million citations dating back to 1966 to the present. Coverage is worldwide, but most records are from English-language sources or have English abstracts.

The Open Nursing Journal
Provides full-text access to research articles, reviews and letters in all areas of nursing.

HealthSource: Nursing/Academic Edition
Provides nearly 550 scholarly full text journals, including nearly 450 peer-reviewed journals focusing on many medical disciplines. Also featured are abstracts and indexing for nearly 850 journals. Coverage of nursing and allied health is particularly strong. In addition, this database includes Clinical Pharmacology, which provides access to up-to-date, concise and clinically relevant drug monographs for all U.S. prescription drugs, hard-to-find herbal and nutritional supplements, over-the-counter products and new drugs.

PsycARTICLES and PsycINFO via EBSCOhost
PsycINFO is the comprehensive index of psychology, with strong coverage of behavioral and abnormal psychology as well as psychiatry.

The databases listed above cover the nursing and medical literature quite well. However, there are some other useful databases:

ScienceDirect
Contains a few hundred full-text medical, nursing and psychology journals published by Elsevier, one of the world's leading scientific publishers.

Health Reference Center Academic via InfoTrac
Provides health information for nursing and allied health students, as well as consumer health research. There is full text for more than 150 journals and magazines.

 

Finding Books

Top

New nursing and medical research is typically disseminated through journal articles, but books can contain excellent summaries of existing research and can be an important component of your research. Just remember to look at the publication dates and note that journal articles may give you more recent research.

To locate books owned by Niagara University Library, use the Library Catalog.

If you want to search for books owned by other libraries, too, then try searching WorldCat, a catalog that contains references to more than 57 million items owned by 9,000 libraries worldwide. Don't worry - if you need a book owned by another library, you can request it. To learn how, jump to the section called Obtaining Materials NU Library Does Not Own.

Finding Films

Top

There are two places to look for educational video and documentaries owned by Niagara University Library.

  1. The Educational DVD Collection is located on the first floor of the Library.
    This collection exceeds 1,500 titles and can be viewed and searched via the NU Library Catalog.
  2. Films on Demand. More than 6,000 video titles are available for streaming anywhere on campus.
  3. The web is a good source of video as well. Refseek links to some of the best sites: http://www.refseek.com/directory/educational_videos.html

Finding Facts, Statistics and Web Sites

Top

The Library has some reference books in the fields of nursing and medicine. For example:

  • Clinical Companion to Medical-Surgical Nursing (Ref RT41 .M488 2000 Suppl.)
  • Mosby's Medical, Nursing and Allied Health Dictionary (Ref R121 .M89 1998)
  • Stedman's Medical Dictionary (Ref R121 .S8 2006)

These and other titles are located in the Reference Collection on the first floor.

The World Wide Web is a great place to find statistical data on health-related topics. Try these sites:

If you are looking for specific information on the World Wide Web, visit a search engine like Google and type your keywords in.

If you would like to browse directories of nursing or medicine web sites, try these:

The American Nurses Association has a web site on the code of ethics.

Obtaining Materials NU Library Does Not Own

Top

If you need an article or a book that NU Library does not own, you can make use of Interlibrary Loan to obtain it.

Tip: In a hurry? If the article or book you need is owned by another library in Western New York, you can visit that library and use their resources on site (view a list of Western New York library web sites).

Please note: If you wish to borrow a book from another Western New York library, you can get an InfoPass card at the Reference Desk.

Citing Your Sources

Top

Format your paper and cite your sources according to the:

• Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (Ref BF76.7 .P83 2010)

This manual is the definitive source. The offical manual is not online, though APA does provide some guidance on how to cite web sites and electronic databases:

http://www.apastyle.org/apa-style-help.aspx

You may also want to check out some style tips from APA:

http://www.apastyle.org/learn/faqs/index.aspx 

Try a Google search of "APA Style" to see other guides. You will find many sites listed that provide examples of APA Style. The first few that are listed tend to be reliable, but you will have to be careful.

Tip: Please talk to your professor if you have questions about how to cite your sources.

 

Tutorials

Top

Here are some helpful tutorials. Each one requires Flash:

See our complete list of research guides.