Narrowing to Articles Likely to be Written by Nurses
- There are ways to narrow your CINAHL and PubMed retrievals so it is more likely that at least one author is a nurse, but these methods are not perfect. They can potentially eliminate some results that are written by nurses.
- To limit to research and/or articles likely to be written by nurses in CINAHL, use the written step by step instructions Find Articles Likely to Have at Least One Nurse Author.
- To limit to research and/or articles likely to be written by nurses in PubMed, follow the process described in Michael McGraw's 2009 article, Narrowing PubMed Searches to Nursing-Related Articles (from the journal Computers, Informatics, Nursing).
- Try this slightly edited filter based on the filter provided in the McGraw (2009) article: (nurse* OR nursing OR RN OR MSN OR ND OR DNSc OR DNP)
- Note: The "Nursing Journals" subset mentioned in the article, along with many other PubMed journal category subsets, was discontinued in 2020. In addition, the PubMed interface and underlying architecture was changed in 2020. The strategy described above appears to still retrieve nurse authored articles but has not been rigorously tested for efficacy with the current PubMed interface.
- Note: You will still have to verify that :
- At least one of the authors is a nurse. (Check the authors' credentials. Just because a researcher is faculty in a school of nursing does not automatically mean that author is a nurse)
- The articles are research.
- They are an appropriate design/study type and level of evidence for your course requirements.
- The authors' credentials are usually not visible in the article record of PubMed or CINAHL, so you still have to look at the actual article full text article to confirm the authors' credentials.
- Sometimes, author credentials are not even indicated in the actual article, or they may be unfamiliar credentials if the author is not based in the United States. You may need to use the internet to attempt to confirm the authors' credentials. Try going to the web sites of the authors' institutions to locate their faculty web page. Faculty pages should include their academic and professional credentials.
