NUR 7004 - Theoretical Foundations for Nursing Practice: Proposition Paper

Using these search options in CINAHL do not guarantee that at least one of the authors will be a nurse (unless you are using one of the nurse author limiters), but the articles will at least be nursing-related. 

If you have questions about how to apply these options to your searches, ask the Nursing Librarian.

Disclaimer: These strategies are not recommended if you need to do a comprehensive search of the literature for patient care.

Available Limiters:

•  First Author is Nurse or Any Author is Nurse  

  • If you are on your results page, choose "Show More" under the year slider then scroll down to check one of these options.

  • This limiter was added in 2009, so it will only retrieve results added to the CINAHL database starting in 2009.  For the most part, this means that the results retrieved by this limiter will have a publication date of 2009 or later.

• Journal Subset = Nursing

  • If you are on your results page, choose "Show More" under the year slider, then under the Journal Subset menu, select Nursing NOT Core Nursing.  (Core Nursing might narrow your retrievals too much).

  • You can also apply this limiter by including it in one of your search blanks: type in SB Nursing .

Nursing as part of your original search strategy:

• Subheading "Nursing", if available 

  • This option only works with some CINAHL subject headings.  It does NOT apply to keyword searching.

  • The CINAHL subject heading you are using may or may not include the subheading "Nursing" (/NU) .  If it does, checking that option will help you find articles that the indexers considered to be nursing-related.

• nurs* as one of your search terms

  • If you add nurs* as one of the terms in your search blanks, the interface will find items that include the word nurse, nurses, or nursing in the title of the article or the journal, in the article abstract, or in the article subject headings.  

  • This is the broadest way to include the concept of nursing in your search so articles retrieved by this method may be less relevant to nursing than articles retrieved by one of the other methods.

Combining the results from these methods

Each of the above methods retrieves different results, so to give yourself a larger single set of results, combine the results from all of these search strategies using OR.

To find OFTEN CITED articles, use Web of Science. 

Use the gold Find It button to determine if we have full text access to the article.  If you have trouble determining if we have it in full text, use the Ask a Librarian button at the top of this page for various help options.

Web of Science also contains Book Citation Indexes, but be aware that they only cover the years 2005-present, so they are of limited use for finding very heavily cited books or articles.  Generally, the more time has passed, the more an item is cited.

Google Scholar will provide some book citations within most of its searches, and it usually also provides a "times cited" count, but without comparing the citation counts with those of other books in that discipline, it is not possible to know what would be considered as "highly cited" for a book.

Search relevant indexes to the journal literature.  Use the links in the "Find books and articles" list above.  CINAHL, PubMed, Web of Science, and subject discipline-specific databases relevant to your proposition (such as PsycINFO or Education Research Complete) are your best bets.

Browse all research guides (guides for other relevant subjects such as medicine, anatomy, education, and psychology)

Or use these related research guides: