Beginner's Research Guide | searching steps

Searching the literature of nursing and health care is best done by taking the following steps:

• Phrase your information need in the form of a question
• Decide what kind of information you are looking for:
• Information in scholarly journal articles
• Information in popular periodicals such as
  The New York Times
• Information that has been aggregated from many sources (such as a textbook)
• Ready reference information: a fact, a definition, a short description, drug side effect, etc
• Are you interested in the historical, ethical, psychosocial, or policy aspects of the topic, or the biomedical aspects of the topic?
• Decide how much you are looking for--are you looking for several recent articles on a topic? Are you writing a paper and looking for both background information from textbooks plus some recent journal information? Are you writing a dissertation? What level of evidence do you require? Information in a journal article is not necessarily ready for clinical application.

Once you have answered these questions you will be ready to:

• locate books
  or
• select a database to locate journal articles by topic
  

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