Welcome to the new library homepage for students who enrolled through Northcentral University. To access the old NCU library homepage, click here. If you enrolled through National University, click here. Please be aware that the NU and NCU students have access to all of the same resources, and we will be merging library homepages by next year.
Welcome to the new library homepage! If you are looking for the old homepage, click here.
When researching a question, don't use complete sentences. Instead, use the most important keywords! For example:
How are mobile devices affecting education?
The most important keywords are:
mobile devices AND education
Use Boolean operators to modify your search. This is very useful when you are searching for journal articles!
Boolean Operators
AND OR NOT
AND will narrow your search results:
"global warming" AND glaciers
OR will expand your search results:
"mobile devices" OR smartphones
NOT will exclude certain results:
cowboys NOT football
Use quotation marks to search for an exact phrase. This will help you find more specific results! For example:
social media = 8221 results
"social media" = 1140 results
Use an asterisk (*) after a set of letters to perform a truncated search. This will find variations of a word. For example:
musc*
will find results containing the words...
muscle, muscular, musculoskeletal, etc.
PICO(T) is a mnemonic used to describe the five elements of a good clinical question.
stands for Patient, Population or Problem
Who is the patient(s) or population and what is their particular condition or healthcare problem?
stands for Intervention or Issue of Interest
What are the main interventions or exposures in my question?
stands for Comparison Intervention or Group
Does your question include a "counter intervention" or exposure, e.g., a recognized standard, or the absence of treatment or exposure?
stands for Outcome
Outcomes of interest from a clinical and patient perspective; what do you want to accomplish?
Will this intervention/exposure:
stands for Time/Type
Intro to Research
Start with these library databases to locate articles from scholarly (peer-reviewed) journals, magazines, trade journals, newspapers, and more.
Content: One central search that contains all of NU's subscribed EBSCO databases.
Purpose: Search for articles from multiple disciplines with this collection of databases from EBSCO.
Content: Collection of more than 30 Proquest subject-specific databases covering Business, Health and Medical, Social Sciences, Education, Science and Technology, and Humanities.
Purpose: Students can view a massive amount of peer-reviewed research across multiple disciplines.
Special Features: Includes a Thesaurus feature that assists in using the database’s controlled vocabulary, as well as read-aloud feature.
Content: Detailed information about periodicals.
Purpose: Use to verify if a journal is peer-reviewed, as well as discover additional information on a specific journal.
Special Features: Provides a review of certain journals
If you didn't find enough resources in our recommended databases, check out some of these additional databases.
Content: Database of intervention focused systematic reviews.
Purpose: Learn the effectiveness of interventions proven through evidence-based research.
Special Features: Includes MESH and PICO search functionality.
Help using this database. Please allow cookies if the page does not load.
Content: Comprehensive consumer health resource providing authoritative information on the full range of health-related issues, from current disease and disorder information to in-depth coverage of alternative medical practices.
Purpose: Provides background reading on health issues. Check the "Refereed publications" box to find peer-reviewed, scholarly articles.
Special Features: A broad collection of premier full-text reference works, Spanish editions of notable content and a Spanish-language search filter, streaming video, audio, and images
Content: Medical database covering nursing, allied health, education and training, development and management, midwifery, health and healthcare economics, clinical medical and healthcare social work, psychiatry and mental health, and traumatology, emergency and critical-care medicine.
Purpose: Provides information about all topics relevant to nursing and nursing education
Special Features: Advanced search functions including MESH capability.
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature.
To have Google Scholar search National University library databases, you'll need to link your Google account to the library. View the tutorial below (2:14) to show you how.
Check out our helpful document delivery services for articles.
Formulating Answerable Clinical Questions is the Foundation of Evidence Based Practice!
Every time we see a patient, we need new information about some element of the diagnosis, prognosis or management. Because our time to try to find this information is often limited, we need to be very efficient in our searching. To achieve this efficiency, we need to become skilled at formulating clinical questions.
Is your clinical question answerable?
Express your clinical question in the PICO format
The PICOT terms come from and should match your clinical question.
Two additional elements of the well-built clinical question are the type of question and the type of study. This information can be helpful in focusing the question and determining the most appropriate type of evidence or study.
For a definition on study types see the Useful Definitions Tab on the EBP Page here: http://nu.libguides.com/NSG607/acquire
|
Common Question Types |
Explanation |
Type of Study |
|
THERAPY (treatment) How to select treatments that do more good than harm and that are worth the efforts and costs of using them |
|
Randomized controlled trial, cohort study |
|
DIAGNOSIS How to select and interpret diagnostic tests |
|
Prospective, blind comparison to a gold standard or cross-sectional |
|
PROGNOSIS (forecast) How to estimate the patient’s likely clinical course over time (based on factors other than the intervention) and anticipate likely complications of disease |
|
Cohort study, case control, case series |
|
HARM/ETIOLOGY (causation) How to identify causes for disease (including iatrogenic forms) |
|
Cohort study, case control, case series |
Adapted from: Fineout-Overholt, E. & Johnston, L. (2005), Teaching EBP: asking searchable, answerable clinical questions. Worldviews on Evidence-Based Nursing, 2, 157–160. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-6787.2005.00032.x
