NUR 3300 - Foundations of Research and Evidence-Based Practice: Literature Search Help

When searching for individual research studies in healthcare, use CINAHL and PubMed. CINAHL is the major database for nursing and allied health literature.  PubMed is a way to search MEDLINE, the major database of literature in the biomedical sciences.

When searching for the best evidence, it is never a good idea to use just one database or search tool exclusively.  Ask your librarian for suggestions of the most relevant search tools for your topic or question.

Keep the following in mind:                                                               

• Google and Google Scholar are NOT sufficient for doing a good literature search in health care, although you can use Google Scholar to supplement your searches in subject specific databases.  
• There are AI tools specifically created for research (that is, for searching and summarizing the literature), but do NOT use those unless specifically permitted by your course faculty. 
  • If your professor does explicitly specify that you are allowed to use  AI tools for literature searching and research in their specific course, you should use tools that are built specifically for that purpose (rather than general purpose models such as ChatGPT), but you also still should use more traditional library databases for healthcare literature.  Follow your professor's requirements for citing and acknowledging any permitted AI use.
• Be transparent: Always describe in your written search narrative how you identified the articles you are citing. 
  • If you identified an article by looking at the references in a systematic review, but the article was not found during your database search, state that when you describe your search strategy. 
  • If you used Google Scholar before or after using library subscription databases, be sure to describe the Google Scholar search strategy you used, if you used any date limiters and how many of the relevancy ranked results you checked before you stopped browsing. 

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.

These persistent links allow Wright State University users to access these articles through our subscription to AJN. Note: If off campus, you will be prompted for your campus w number and password before being taken to the article.

This collection of articles was authored by faculty from the Arizona State University College of Nursing and Health Innovation's Center for the Advancement of Evidence-Based Practice and published in the American Journal of Nursing (AJN)