PICO: Find Articles

For the complete list of library databases, check out the A - Z List. Under the drop down menu for Explore Subject Areas, you can limit the selection of databases by Nursing, Medicine and Health.

When accessing library databases off campus or wirelessly on campus, you will need to provide your EasyLogin username and password.

Image by RSvB is licensed under CC PDM 1.0

When you search in academic databases including MCC Library OneSearch, keywords give you the best search results. Next time you search, instead of typing in a long phrase such as "all the research that shows evidence to prove there's no life on the moon,"  try keywords.

A better search about lunar life would use keywords and look like this:

"life on the moon" and research

Video contents:

1:07 Searching in the Nursing & Allied Health database

5:13 Finding nursing research using OneSearch

7:37 Searching for nurse authors in CINAHL

9:05 How to use the citations in a review paper to find additional sources

Here are some tips:

1. You can add 

AND nurs*

to your keyword search in any of our databases. This will look for some form of the word nurse in the title, abstract, and subject tags of the articles.

2. You can choose "advanced search" in  CINAHL and find options to check off for nursing. Choose nursing under Journal Subset and you can check "Any author is a nurse," a box just above the Journal Subset box. In other databases you can choose Nursing and Allied Health as a discipline. 

Please ask a librarian if you need help with these strategies.

Just as with library databases, there are open access databases that have helpful limiters. Watch the video to see searches in these three excellent options.

Video contents:

1:09 PubMed - limiting to nursing journals

5:21 Sigma Repository

9:47 Nursing Commons

1. In PubMed, add AND nurs* and/or check the "Nursing journals" box in your results (see video for demo).

2. Search an open access nursing collection:

• All material in the Sigma Repository are "authored by a single nurse, multiple nurses, or a collaborative group that includes a nurse. The nurse does not need to be the lead author."
• Nursing Commons is part of The Digital Commons Network, which  brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, the Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work."

Remember to examine whether the article you find has been peer-reviewed. 

You can access our Getting Started With Research guide if you need more help, and you can also contact the library by phone, chat, or email, or by coming in. We'd be happy to work with you!