NUR 7005 - Nursing Research and Evidence for Practice: Search for Evidence

The search videos on this page all use the PICO(T) framework, but please note that PICO(T) may not always be the most appropriate framework to help you to identify relevant evidence for your particular issue.  Contact your librarian for assistance with other frameworks.

When searching for evidence for clinical questions or issues, you should at mininum search the Cochrane Library, MEDLINE (either through PubMed or another interface such as EBSCO) and CINAHL.

If your issue or topic is related to psychology or has a mental health focus, you should also search APA PsycINFO.  Depending on your topic, other databases may also be relevant to search.

Depending on the availability of literature on your topic or question, you might try searching Google Scholar to supplement your searches of the above databases, but it should NEVER be used exclusively.

Search Examples for Boolean Logic

Boolean OR

When search terms are connected with OR, the search retrieves all the search terms used, regardless of whether all of them are found in the same article.  The colorized portion of this diagram represents all the search terms that would be retrieved.

More than one of the search terms may be in the same article, but even if only one of the terms is found in the source, it would  still be retrieved. For this reason, OR is often used to connect synonyms or related terms to make sure the search retrieves as many relevant sources as possible even if they did not use your original preferred term.

How this search would work in CINAHL:

"eating disorders" OR anorexia OR bulimia

Quotation marks are used to find eating disorders only as an exact phrase.

Boolean AND

When search terms are connected with AND, but ALL of the terms will be included in all of the articles or sources retrieved.  Notice that the shaded area representing retrieved results is much smaller for a search where all the terms are combined with AND, because it only retrieves sources that contain all 3 terms.  The shaded area of the Venn diagram represents only the cases where all 3 terms intersect or exist in the same source.

Although of these Boolean examples are too broad and retrieve many more results than you would expect to retrieve and review when searching for sources, notice that the number of results retrieved in CINAHL are considerably smaller when the same 3 search terms are ANDed together instead of combined with OR.

How this search would work in CINAHL:

"eating disorders" AND anorexia AND bulimia

Quotation marks are used to find eating disorders only as an exact phrase.

Combining AND and OR Boolean operators in one search

Often it is more effective to use both the AND and the OR connectors in a single search.

For instance, when searching a PICO question, there may be more than one term that is commonly used for a problem, intervention or outcome, so it is useful to OR all of those terms together.  For the search to work, it is necessarily to keep all the ORed terms separate from those being combined with AND.  Enclosing the ORs in parentheses is a good way to do this, as indicated below.  Note: Date and publication limiters have been applied to this search.

("eating disorders" OR "disordered eating" OR bulimia OR anorexia OR pica OR "night eating syndrome")

AND

(awareness OR mindfulness OR meditation)

AND

("self image" OR "body image" OR "self esteem" OR "self concept")

The Planning Your Search, CINAHL, and PubMed videos were all developed from scripts written by and video images recorded and edited by Ximena Chrisagis for Wright State University (using Camtasia).  The voice narration of the scripts for the Planning video and the CINAHL and PubMed search process videos was generated from text to speech voice options in the Microsoft ClipChamp app that were available at the time the video was first recorded and edited.

Wright State University does NOT currently subscribe to the Cochrane Library, so we cannot access current subscription-based content. However, the Cochrane Library is still searchable and Cochrane Reviews are still indexed for MEDLINE. Also, many Cochrane Reviews are available as open access after one year. If you need a Cochrane Review that requires a subscription or fee, please contact your subject librarian.

The PICO(T) question being searched in these Cochrane Library videos is: 

In term newborns, how does skin to skin contact compared with no skin to skin contact affect breastfeeding duration and exclusivity within the first month after birth?

Although the keywords are different, you would use the same process if you were searching directly in the Cochrane Library for the question about the effect of aerobic exercise on older adults with mild cognitive impairment.

The main reason to search the Cochrane Library is to find Systematic Reviews in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, but the Cochrane Library also provides abstracts of clinical trials, some of which are also indexed in PubMed and CINAHL.  It will also retrieve abstracts of clinical trials from journals that are indexed in Embase or clinical trials that have not been published but are registered at clinical trials.gov.  

The published clinical trials may include randomized controlled trials that you will not find in your searches of other databases.

Note: Wright State's subscription to the APA PsycINFO database uses the EBSCO same interface shown in the CINAHL videos on this page, so the Thesaurus and Methology filters are located in a different location than shown on these videos, but they still perform the same functions these videos demonstrate. These videos were developed by the American Psychological Association under a standard YouTube license.