ACWR303 - Academic Writing for Nursing

The purpose of this phase is to actually find the articles and books that will enable you to complete your research.

To do this, you will want to:

Identify the most appropriate databases for your topic - This is one of the most important things you can do. Many hours have been misspent searching a business database for a science topic, or searching the catalogue for an article. The primary database for Nursing, called CINAHL, might be the most All of the library research databases are arranged by subject, and have brief descriptions of the content covered. Be sure to read these descriptions (including the dates of coverage) before entering a given database to ensure you're starting in the right place. You should also familiarize yourself with the subject pages put together by the librarians at the University; they will offer database recommendations as well.

Brainstorm the terminology you'll use to describe your topic to the research database (or person you're talking to). In the research world this terminology is variously described as descriptors, subject headings, and key words. Sometimes it's difficult to think outside the box and come up with synonyms - the ThinkMap Visual Thesaurus may provide you with some good suggestions, and it's fun to boot! Simply type in a term and it will provide you with alternatives, along with definitions.

Combining search terms. Library research databases make use of something called Boolean operators to combine different search terms. While it may sound foreign, it simply means the use of the word AND to combine unrelated terms, OR to combine synonyms, and NOT to exclude certain terminology. Here a very useful tutorial for how Boolean operators work. Truncation is a useful search tool as well. You use a special symbols such as * ? (which differ from database to database) to compensate for variant spellings or plurals, so a search on multipl* would automatically search multiple, multiples, multiply, multiplication, multipliers.

Methodically search relevant databases. You'll discover some overlap in the various databases you search, but no single database (and that includes Google when searching the web) covers all literature. This means you'll need to repeat your search several times using the same or similar terminology in several different databases.

Request assistance from experts:
    Make an appointment with your subject librarian for help in searching databases and retrieving results.

    Meet with your professor for guidance on "the" authors and researchers in your topic area

Take good notes and save documents / citations as you go! There are few things worse than knowing you found a really good article two days ago, but not being able to find it again today.