Q. I need to find research articles written by a nurse.
Answer
The Nursing database called CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature) can help. It has limits for Research articles. It also has limits for "the author is a nurse". This limit was just added in the summer of 2010 so can only be used for more recent articles.
Here is a video tutorial of using CINAHL to complete this assignment.
How to Use Limits to Find Research Articles by a Nurse:
1. Connect to the CINAHL database from the Nursing Library Resource Page
2. Go to Advanced Searching and perform the search on your topic. Enter your search terms one concept at a time.
Please Note: There are not necessarily articles published/written by a nurse on your topic! If you follow the directions on this page -- it is possible your search results in zero results. You may have to broaden your search, choose another aspect of your topic, or ultimately change your topic altogether.
3. Go to the link titled "Refine your results". This appears next to your search results on the left side of the screen.
4. Click the "Show More" link to reveal all available limits.
5. Click a checkmark next to English and "Any Author is a Nurse". If the age or year of the article is important to your question or assignment, you can use the year limiter because sometimes this is part of the assignment but often it is not necessary to limit by year. The newest articles will come up at the top of the search.
Click the Search button.
If the "Any Author is a Nurse" limit does not work for you, you have to look at the full text of articles to determine if the author is a nurse. This is usually on the first page of the article and may be noted by degrees (CRNA, MSN, RN, etc...)after the name or in an "about the authors" section. Some journals do not provide this information at all.
Or try
Connect to PUBMED from the Library's home page.
In the search box type (copy and paste) the following exactly: "RN"[ad] OR "CRNA"[ad] OR "MSN"[ad] OR "APRN"[ad] OR "CNS"[ad] OR "DNP"[ad] OR "NP"[ad] OR "nursing"[ad] AND [your search term]
So for example, if you wanted to search Pubmed for Nursing authored articles on Patient Falls your search would look like this: "RN"[ad] OR "CRNA"[ad] OR "MSN"[ad] OR "APRN"[ad] OR "CNS"[ad] OR "DNP"[ad] OR "NP"[ad] OR "nursing"[ad] AND Patient Falls
This will search the Author Description field and any author that includes RN in their credentials will show up. It is up to you as the researcher to be sure that the authors are indeed nurses while searching in Pubmed.
Please Note: There are not necessarily articles published/written by a nurse on your topic! If you follow the directions on this page -- it is possible your search results in zero results. You may have to broaden your search, choose another aspect of your topic, or ultimately change your topic altogether.
Here is a video tutorial of using PubMed to complete this assignment.
Please feel free to contact Chris Bishop, Health Professions Librarian for further assistance. cbishop@marian.edu