NUR 7005 - Nursing Research and Evidence for Practice: Home

When searching for individual research studies in healthcare, PubMed and CINAHL should be used. 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.

These persistent links allow Wright State University users to access these articles through WSU's 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)

This video from EBSCO shows how to start searching CINAHL Subject Headings from scratch.  It does not use a PICO question example, but you can use the same process to identify subject headings for any of the keyword elements of your PICO(T) question.

Tutorial credit: U.S. National Library of Medicine

Tutorial credit: U.S. National Library of Medicine

This National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) video demonstrates how to build a search from scratch using MeSH.  Although it is not a search on a PICO(T) question, the same process can be used to determine if there are relevant Medical Subject Headings for your population, intervention, comparison, and/or outcome.

You can preform a keyword/phrase search of PsycINFO using the PICO elements of your question as the search concepts, but you could also make your search more relevant by using subject headings for each aspect of your PICO question.  This video illustrates a sample search of a generic research question in PsycINFO using subject headings instead of plain keywords and phrases.  

Although keyword and phrase searching often works well for PICO questions, it may not be enough to identify all the most relevant and current evidence for every clinical question or topic.  You may have to do a subject headings search.

This video demonstrates how to search the PsycINFO indexing terms (also known as the thesaurus).  This process performs the same function as using CINAHL Subject Headings in CINAHL or Medical Subject Headings in PubMed, although the indexing terms used from database to database can vary even if you are searcing the same topic.