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Nursing 370: Research & Evidence Based Practice: Basics

A collection of resources for students enrolled in Nursing 370/390, whether on-campus or remote.

Citing Sources

The library has an APA citation style guide with explanations and examples to help you properly cite your sources!

Core Databases

Identifying Search Terms

Your PICO question can help you to identify keywords to use in a search. You don’t want to use the entire clinical question as your search terms. Instead, you want to pull out the most important and defining words to optimize your search results.

 Scenario

Looking at a sample PICO question, we can pull out some keywords to try a search with:

“Are patient education programs effective in increasing patient exercise in the population of patients age 65 and older with high blood pressure?”

The keywords for this question are: “patient education,” “exercise,” and “high blood pressure.”

Note that we aren’t including the patients’ age in the initial search. This variable can be considered on an individual article basis, or be used in a search filter in some databases. We can add it later if we are seeing lots of articles about different age ranges.

We also are not using the word "effective" as a keyword. Filler words and phrases like 'impact', 'benefits', 'pros and cons', etc. may clutter your search with unrelated articles. The impact, whether positive or negative, of your chosen intervention will be described at the end of an article's abstract, and in the final section of the paper itself.

Content from PubMed.