Beginner's Research Guide | locating article citations in databases

When searching for journal articles by topic, you should start with an index. Electronic indexes (also known as databases) such as MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and so forth, provide a catalog of citations to:

• articles in newspapers, magazines, & journals
• chapters in books
• essays in collections
• government, international, & other documents
• dissertations

Tip: Database citations describe the contents of journal articles; they may link to the full-text of the journal article.

Below is a sample citation from a database. It describes an article from the journal Nursing Research. Information is arranged in individual fields: the author field, the title field, the source field (journal title), and so forth.

Citations are the building blocks of databases. And database searchers may search for words in any or all fields. For example, you might search for Ratner in the author field, Smoking cessation in the Subject Heading field, or the phrase "quit smoking" in any field, including the abstract.

An advantage of searching electronically is that a searcher can combine search concepts using the AND connector (also known as a Boolean operator).

So, for example, you can gather all of the articles tagged with the subject heading Smoking Cessation and all of the articles tagged with the heading Nursing Interventions in a search statement like this:

Smoking Cessation AND Nursing Interventions

Boolean AND

Selecting a Database

Once you have decided to search the literature for journal articles, you will need to select a database.

Consider the time frame as well as the coverage of your topic. For example, CINAHL (the electronic version of the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health) is the first place to search for nursing literature, because CINAHL indexes over 1200 journals and publications related to nursing and allied health and it provides online abstracts for more than 800 of these journal titles. CINAHL covers the time period 1982 to the present.

All searchers of nursing information should always search MEDLINE, also, because MEDLINE (the premier biomedical database) indexes many of the international nursing journals that are not indexed in CINAHL.

A summary of databases in the health sciences is detailed at: Health Sciences Indexes and Abstracts. Since nursing topics are usually interdisciplinary, you should search more than one database.

TIP: Getting connected: you will notice that the links below remind you that access to fee-based databases may require that off campus users authenticate themselves. Use the help links for each campus to find out more.

• For a more complete explanation of Boolean Operators, click here.

• Bobst Library Databases Page
  http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/database.htm

  >>Information about remote access

• Ehrman Databases Page
  http://library.med.nyu.edu/library/databases/databases.html

  >>Information about remote access

• Databases at Mount Sinai (MSSM ID and password needed for selected databases)
  http://fusion.mssm.edu/levy/databases/

  >>Information about remote access

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