UVM Libraries Research Guides: Nursing Resources for Students and Faculty: 2. Searching for Information

What Kind of Question Is It?

All questions fall into one of two categories: background or foreground. What's the difference?

Background Questions

Foreground Questions

Focus on general knowledge about an illness, disease, condition, process, or thing. These questions typically ask who, what, where, when, how, and why about something specific.

For example:

How do I insert a catheter?
What causes migraines?
When should I turn a patient with a pressure ulcer?

Focus on specific knowledge to inform clinical decisions. These questions typically focus on a specific patient or problem and are more complex when compared to background questions.

For example:

Is light therapy more effective at reducing jaundice in infants than no light therapy?
Is a pressure-reducing mattress more effective at preventing pressure ulcers than patient repositioning?

Why is this important?

The type of question you have will help you decide which resource(s) you should search. The best source for background questions are books and point of care resources like UpToDate. The best source for foreground questions are original research studies, which can be found in databases like CINAHL or PubMed.

Resources for Background Questions

Books

The library has close to a thousand books, guides, handbooks, etc. on nursing. Most of these books are in print and are shelved in the WY section. The rest are ebooks that are available for use online. The best way to search for books in our collection is to use CatQuest.

Point of Care Resources

These resources provide searchable summaries of evidence on specific topics.They are updated regularly and synthesize all the best and latest evidence on clinical topics to aid with diagnosis and treatment. They save clinicians time and effort by eliminating the need to do rigorous research before making a patient care decision.

Natural Medicines This link opens in a new window
This resource is an evidence-based, full-text resource for information about natural medicines and complementary therapies. Detailed monographs are provided for hundreds of foods, herbs, and dietary supplements, including information about their safety and effectiveness, dosing and administration, adverse effects, interactions, and references.

Need some help searching Natural Medicines? Please contact a librarian.

UpToDate This link opens in a new window
This resource contains descriptions of medical diseases and disorders and is designed to be consulted by health care practitioners as they evaluate potential clinical diagnostic and treatment options. It also includes drug information, medical calculators, images, patient information in English and Spanish, continuing medical education modules, and links to full-text journal articles.

Need help searching UpToDate? Check out the searching section of their user's manual.

VisualDx This link opens in a new window
This resource is a diagnostic decision support system designed to aid health care practitioners in the diagnosis of visually identifiable diseases. As the clinician enters patient findings, it creates a differential diagnosis of visually identifiable diseases, drug reactions, and infections. The database contains many images from people of different ages, skin colors, body size, and other variations that can affect the recognition of these visible symptoms of disease.

Need help searching VisualDx? This video will show you how to run a basic search.

Cochrane Library This link opens in a new window
This resource includes systematic reviews from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews and the Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effectiveness. It also includes other resources such as the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials.

Need help searching the Cochrane Library? Please check the User Guide for assistance.

Articles, Journals, Databases - What's the Difference?

Resources for Forground Questions

Research Databases

These resources provide access to original research, such as randomized controlled trials, as well as reviews of original research, such as systematic reviews. These articles usually focus on a very specific topic and population.

CINAHL Complete This link opens in a new window
This resource provides bibliographic records, some with links to full text, for the research and professional literature in nursing and other allied health fields such as physical therapy and athletic training.

Need help searching CINAHL? Check out our keyword searching and subject searching tutorials.

PubMed This link opens in a new window
This free resource comprises citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. PubMed citations and abstracts include the fields of biomedicine and health, covering portions of the life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering. This resource is developed and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM).

Need some help searching PubMed? Check out this short tutorial.

Ovid MEDLINE This link opens in a new window
This resource is used to find scholarly and evidence-based articles from journals in medicine, including nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and health care administration, plus allied health fields and biosciences.

Need some help searching Ovid Medline? Check out this basic searching tutorial.

Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
This resource provides access to scholarly literature including articles, theses, books, abstracts, court opinions, technical reports, patents and many other document types. Google Scholar's coverage is extremely broad and sometimes more up-to-date than other databases - but its non-selective coverage may include lower-quality publications.

This link to Google Scholar will enable UVM affiliates to easily link through to materials to which we have access.

Need some help searching Google Scholar? Please contact a librarian.

Web of Science This link opens in a new window
This resource provides access to the scholarly literature across disciplines, and includes citations to journal articles, conference proceedings, books, and more. It includes a cited reference search feature that enables users to trace the impact of individual scholars' work, analyzes search results by discipline, and creates citation reports of a set of search results.

Need some help searching Web of Science? Please check out this video.

PsycINFO This link opens in a new window
This resource contains international scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, books and dissertations in psychology, education, and the social, behavioral and health sciences. PsycINFO is the most comprehensive database for literature in the psychological sciences.

Need help searching PsycINFO? Check out this tutorial.

What Is a Research Article?

More often than not, you will be searching for a scholarly, or research, article. How can you tell if an article is a research article? Research articles usually have specific key elements that distinguish them from more popular articles. Click on the image below to see an illustration of these key elements. Clicking on each colored box will open a brief explanation.

If you'd like to learn more about research articles, please check out our Anatomy of a Scholarly Journal Article guide. It has more information about each section of an article as well as scholarly, or research, literature in general.

Nursing Resources for Students and Faculty