Research Guides: Nursing: 2: Find Sources

Find Sources

Find Journal articles report the results of research by experts. Sometimes they're also called "peer-reviewed articles," "scholarly articles," or "academic articles." They are often used in academic research.

You should use journal articles because they:

Contain evidence based on research
Are written by experts
Focus on a narrow topic
Provide detailed information
Are probably more accurate because of the peer-review process
Lend credibility to your paper

Find journal articles in these databases:

PubMed This link opens in a new window PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 21 million citations from biomedical and life science journals.
To determine more easily if UNC has access to the full text of articles, login using the username and password available from the online Username and Passwords list. When first logging into PubMed, choose NCBI account. Then you will be asked to enter the username and password associated with this account. For further assistance, contact Michener Library at (970) 351-2671.
CINAHL Plus with Full Text This link opens in a new window
CINAHL Plus® with Full Text is a robust collection of full text for nursing & allied health journals, providing full text for more than 770 journals indexed in CINAHL®. This authoritative file contains full text for many of the most used journals in the CINAHL index, with no embargo. CINAHL Plus with Full Text is the core research tool for all areas of nursing and allied health literature. Full text coverage dates back to 1937.
ScienceDirect This link opens in a new window
Homepage for content published by Elsevier. UNC does not subscribe to all titles.
PsycINFO This link opens in a new window
Index of journal and book literature from the American Psychological Association.
UpToDate This link opens in a new window
UpToDate is an evidence-based knowledge system authored by physicians to help clinicians make the right decisions at the point of care. All UpToDate content is written and edited by a global community of 5,100 physicians, world-renowned experts in their specialties.

Books on a shelf Some books include research by experts, and you may want to use them in your research project.

You should use books because they:

Give a broad overview of one or more topics
Explain a complex topic (books are easier to understand than journal articles)
Offer in-depth analysis of a topic
Summarize previous research on a topic

Find books in these databases:

UNC Libraries Catalog
Searches books, eBooks, music, videos, and other items at the Michener and Skinner Libraries.
Prospector
Searches books at other libraries in Colorado and Wyoming. Request books from these libraries and have them delivered to the Michener or Skinner Libraries.

Graph on a paper Statistics can come from different sources, including the federal and state governments and non-profit organizations.

You should use statistics because they help:

Explain how widespread the problem is
Explain how severe the problem is
Convince your readers that the problem needs to be solved

Find statistics in these databases:

County Health Rankings and Roadmaps
The CHR&R program provides data, evidence, guidance, and examples to build awareness of the multiple factors that influence health and support leaders in growing community power to improve health equity. The Rankings are unique in their ability to measure the health of nearly every county in all 50 states, and are complemented by guidance, tools, and resources designed to accelerate community learning and action.
Census Bureau Data
Data.Census.Gov is the latest search engine from the United States Census Bureau. The data available through this website pulls information from various US Census websites and is limited to census information after the year 2000.
National Center for Health Statistics
The National Center for Health Statistics, through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, compile statistical information to guide actions and policies to improve the health of the population.They are a unique public resource for health information—a critical element of public health and health policy.

Statista This link opens in a new window
Statista is one of the first statistic portals in the world to integrate data on over 80,000 topics from over 18,000 sources onto a single professional platform. Categorized into 21 market sectors, Statista provides direct access to quantitative data on media, business, finance, politics, and a wide variety of other areas of interest or markets. Data can be downloaded and exported for academic use.
UpToDate This link opens in a new window
UpToDate is an evidence-based knowledge system authored by physicians to help clinicians make the right decisions at the point of care. All UpToDate content is written and edited by a global community of 5,100 physicians, world-renowned experts in their specialties.

Researcher collects data Tests and measures are often used in research to collect information about people. There are different types of tests and measures, including:

Assessments
Scales
Questionnaires
Surveys
Inventories

If you are conducting an experiment or observation, you may be able to use or adapt an existing test or measure for your own data collection. While some tests and measures are commercial and proprietary (cost money), others are available for free to researchers.

Find tests and measures in these databases:

Health and Psychosocial Instruments This link opens in a new window
Health & Psychosocial Instruments (HaPI), produced by Behavioral Measurement Database Services, is a comprehensive bibliographic database providing information about behavioral measurement instruments. Information in the database is abstracted from hundreds of leading journals covering health sciences and psychosocial sciences.
PsycTESTS This link opens in a new window
PsycTESTS, produced by the American Psychological Association (APA), serves as a repository for a growing selection of psychological tests and measures, including thousands of actual test instruments and test items that are available for immediate download and use in research and teaching.
Mental Measurements Yearbook with Tests in Print This link opens in a new window
Mental Measurements Yearbook contains descriptive information and reviews of commercially available standardized educational, personality, aptitude, neuropsychological, achievement, and intelligence tests. Tests in Print (TIP) serves as a comprehensive bibliography to commercially available tests that are currently in print in the English language. TIP provides information including test purpose, test publisher, in-print status, print, test acronym, intended test population, administration times, publication date(s), and test author(s).

Search Effectively

Yellow, blue, and purple keys Unlike Google, library databases can't understand complete sentences. You'll need to break your topic down into the most important concepts, also called keywords, and use those keywords to search library databases.

Example topic: How does social media impact happiness among teenagers?

Keywords: social media, happiness, teenagers

Brainstorm synonyms:

Sometimes experts use different terms than we use in everyday conversation. It's important to think of synonyms and related terms for your keywords so that you can use different combinations of words to get the best results when searching.

Keyword: teenagers

Synonyms: adolescents, youth

Library databases often have built-in search tools. Try them out!

Peer-Reviewed: Limit your search to journal articles.
Discipline: Limit your search to a particular discipline (such as psychology or education).
Publication Date: Limit your search to sources published during certain years.
Subject Terms: These are like library hashtags. Limit your search to sources about that subject.

Quotation marks Experts often cite each other's work, and that can help you find more sources on your topic!

To find older relevant sources:

Find the list of sources at the end of a relevant source you've found. This may be called "bibliography," "works cited," or "references."
Look for titles in the list that relate to your topic.
Copy and paste relevant titles into a library database.

To find newer relevant sources:

When you find a relevant source in a database, look for a link called "Cited by."
Click this link to see more recent sources that may be related to your topic.

Create Your PubMed Account

PubMed is a free database that gives you access to articles from biomedical and life science journals. This video shows how to create a PubMed account so that you can easily check if UNC has access to the full text of articles you find.