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NURS 360: Journal Club 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.

CINAHL search tips

For this assignment, use the Advanced Search option in CINAHL.  Why? 

  • It provides more flexibility to help set up your PICO searches
  • It keeps a history of your searches, which you can then email to yourself and attach to your assignment.  (Remember: One of the requirements of this assignment is to show your searches, the terms you used, the databases you searched, and how many search results you got.  This feature goes a long way to assisting you with that part of your assignment.)

Example of how to set up your search

This screenshot shows how I set up my PICO search for finding studies that looked at the effect of music therapy on seniors.  Note how each line of the search represents a line in my PICO.  You don't have to enter all parts of your PICO question into your search.  In my case, I have no comparison to my intervention, so I left the C portion of my PICO out of my search.

Also note that CINAHL allows me to filter to only peer-reviewed articles, and I can also limit by date range, which is useful if you want to focus on current research.  Check your assignment instructions if you're not sure about how current your articles should be.

CINAHL PICO example

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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.