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NURS 360: Group literature search assignment

This guide has been created to assist with one of the literature searching assignments for NURS 360. NOTE: This particular assignment may not be offered every year, or by every instructor.

The literature search assignment for NURS 360 varies from semester to semester (depending on who's teaching it) but it typically requires you to find four empirical studies (journal articles) that your group deems the most relevant to answering your clinical question.

To help you with this assignment, this guide will provide you with some practical tips and search suggestions to help you get started with your own research.

Use the menu on the left to navigate to whichever part of the assignment you need help with.

Assignment requirements

Steps involved:

  1. Pick a clinical question from the list your instructor provides. 
  2. Identify the key words that best express what your clinical question is focusing on. 
  3. Determine your selection criteria. 
  4. Build a search using the search terms you've identified.  Use search operators (AND, OR) to combine your search terms into a search string.  Consider using additional search syntax (like truncation, phrase searching or proximity searching) if it will improve your search.
  5. Test the search you've built in a database (e.g. CINAHL (EBSCO) or Medline (OVID))

Assignment criteria:

  • Articles must be empirical studies.  This is a fancy way of saying the article must be original research measuring some sort of phenomena.
  • Studies must be published within the last 20 years. 
  • Provide your search strategy including the search terms you used, database(s) searched, and number of search results.
  • Provide APA-formatted citations for the articles you chose.

 

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This work by The University of Victoria Libraries is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License unless otherwise indicated when material has been used from other sources.