This presentation is updated for the two nursing courses I'm embedded.

2. If you struggled with finding
information you needed for more
than 10 minutes, ask the librarian!

3. Key questions
What am I going to research on?
How to go about researching
for my topic?
How do I know I’m not repeating
the research others already did?

4. • MEDLINE -- The National Library of Medicine's
(NLM) premier bibliographic database
• 2 platforms at UTHSC: OVIDSP/MEDLINE
and MEDLINE/PubMed
• Subjects: Biomedicine (e.g., medicine, nursing,
dentistry, veterinary medicine, health care
system, and preclinical sciences)
• 18 + million references from approximately
5,500 worldwide journals
• Dating back to 1946

5. • CINAHL– Cumulative Index for Nursing and
Allied Health Literature
• @UTHSC: CINAHL Plus with Full Text
via EBSCOhost
• Subjects: nursing, biomedicine,
alternative/complementary medicine,
consumer health and 17 allied health
disciplines
• 2+ million references to over 1200 journals
• Dating back to 1982

6. • Subjects: Behavioral and social sciences;
psychiatry; neuroscience; and medical law &
ethics.
• More than 3 million records and cover over
2450 worldwide journals
• Dating back to 1806

7. • Subjects: Multi disciplines
• Over 41 million records and cover 17,500
journals, 315 million scientific web pages, 24
million patent records, 300 book series, etc.
• Dating back to 1996

9. • PubMed - Medical Subject Headings
(MeSH)
• CINAHL - CINAHL Subject Headings
• PsychINFO - Thesaurus of Psychological
Index Terms
Controlled Vocabularies

10. • Effective communication
• More relevant and better search results
• Searching like an expert

14. Major Topics
Major Topics

15. cy
AND Pregnan
Diabetics
Headache OR Migraine
Music NOT Jazz

16. • How to communicate effectively with
databases
• Scope of each database
• Database indexing schemes
• Search strategy
• Proper search terms
• Relationship among search terms
• One search is never enough

17. • To get more relevant and focused results,
start your search with subject headings
• Use keyword searching if no subject
headings are found
• Attach subheadings to major headings
for specific searches

18. • What is your destination?
• What are you
doing with the
information?

19. • Dissertation: Thorough and exhaust all the
resources
• Drug effects: Comprehensive
• Grant proposal: A few good articles to provide
adequate justifications
• Course assignment: A few good articles to get
the work done

20.  Practice makes perfect!
 Focus on what you are doing. If you don't
know what you are doing, you will never
know when information is enough.
 Understand what you need. If you don't
understand what you need, you will never
know when information is enough.

21. lwu5@uthsc.edu
(901) 447-1776
Toll free: 1-877-747-0004