NUR 3200 - Health, Wellness, and Diversity Within Families: Healthcare Articles

Short video (by Mary Poffenroth) that demonstrates the difference between a website and a journal article.

Question 1: Which of these sources is NOT from a scholarly / peer-reviewed journal?

CINAHL, or the Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature, is an electronic database in which you can find references to journal articles as well as books and book chapters.  The version Wright State has is called CINAHLPlus with Full Text. It indexes more than 5000 health care journals and provides access to more than 400 active full-text nursing and allied health journals.  Although some coverage goes back as far as 1937, the bulk of the coverage goes back to 1981. 

You can search CINAHL by typing in keywords for your main concepts, as you are used to doing in internet search engines.  However, be aware that  performing a subject heading search can often be a more efficient way to find the most relevant results on your topic. 

Use CINAHL (The Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature) to find an articles from peer-reviewed nursing journals.  (Use the link in the box above or through the library Databases list).

Identifying keywords that work well as subjects when searching the healthcare literature

Searching for a health condition and the term risk or risk factors will often work well in CINAHL.  Risk factors is a descriptive term (subheading) often used in the database to narrow a subject search.

Hypertension and risk

Hypertension and “risk factors”

Stress* also works reasonably well as a search term because it is commonly used in healthcare literature in combination with specific diseases or conditions. (With the asterisk, stress* picks up the word stress, stresses, stressful, stressor, stressors).

On the other hand, the term protective factors as not as common in the healthcare databases, so if you use search on a particular health condition and the phrase “protective factors”, you will results, but the results you do get may not be as relevant because it is not part of the subject indexing terminology of the database.

Hypertension and “protective factors” or hypertension and "family strengths"  will likely not retrieve very many really relevant results, especially if you are limiting your results to results from nursing journals, as described below.  Adding limiters reduces the number of results you have to choose from.

To search for literature on protective factors or family strengths, you will retrieve more relevant articles if you determine what the protective factors or health factors are for that condition and run a search on it.  For example, you might search for:

Hypertension and (physical activity or exercise)

You might also search your health condition as a subject along with the subheading “prevention and control”.  Ask your librarian for help with this.

(MH "Hypertension/PC")

After you have searched and have a list of results to choose from, check the peer-reviewed limiter.  Then, just type in SB nursing on the last line and leave the drop down at the default).  You can also limit to English language.

This video demonstrates the use of subject headings in CINAHL, but searching Medical Subject Headings in EBSCO MEDLINE works the same way, except that the tab is labelled "MEDLINE-MeSH".

In some cases, research articles may focus on a population that does not have the same ethnicity as that of your family.  This does not necessarily mean the research is not relevant to your family, but you have the option to search for articles that provide a broader overview or perspective.

There are many different types of review articles.  The Publication Type limiter "Review" in CINAHL finds reviews of the published literature.  CINAHL Reviews may be narrative reviews of previous literature on the topic or they may present a more general introduction on a topic. Reviews may mention findings from research studies or case reports.  Either way, they usually provide a broader summary or overview of what is known about a topic than CINAHL's "Research Article" Publication Type. (In contrast, publications indexed as a "Research Article" in CINAHL present detailed methods, findings, and discussion of a the significance research study).  To limit to review articles in CINAHL, add AND PT "Review" as one of your search terms.