For more information on the databases and techniques described on this page check out the Lunch & Learn sessions and related guides for:
An important part of your first assignment is making sure that your articles are coming from journals that are solely focused on the nursing field.
There are a couple of ways you can make sure they are the right stuff:
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-- many (if not most) will have the word Nurse, Nurses, or Nursing right in the title. This is a clear sign of a Nursing Journal.
a few notable exceptions:
Heart & Lung (American Association of Heart Failure Nurses.)
Australian Critical Care (Australian College of Critical Care Nurses)
ORNAC Journal (Operating Room Nurses Association of Canada)
American Journal of Critical Care (American Association of Critical-Care Nurses)
Next. If you think you have a Nursing Journal in your hand but you aren't sure; check the scope of the journal.
1. Do a google search for the title (don't forget to include the keyword 'journal' so you stay on topic)
2. Look for results that will have the genuine scope of the document. Sometimes they are a website for the journal itself, but most often it will be for the publisher so look for something similar to the following URLs:
3 Check the scope (About, About publication, etc.). Look for clues in the journal scope regarding related Nursing associations, or phrases to indicate that Nursing is the sole focus. You don’t want a journal that is multidisciplinary. Here are some examples:
Avoid
Isolating Nursing Journals in your search can be tricky; here are some tips:
- Look at the title to see if they meet the criteria discussed on the previous section
-- Some databases like CINAHL (example below), Ovid, and PubMed have specialized subset limiters and filters that can be used to isolate Nursing Journals.
CAUTION: you still need to check the scope if it's not apparent from the title. For example, The Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences is often identified as a nursing journal by these limiters; but while much of its focus IS nursing, it's actually multidisciplinary.
-- you could also use Publication filters to exclude specific titles in your search results that do not meet your criteria, or conversely, look at only isolated titles (OneSearch - as shown in the example - allows us to do both simultaneously - however, not all journals included in the results are displayed).
Look for filters called "Publication Name" or "Journal Title". This is a much slower process and not my favoured technique. But it is an option depending on the database you are using.
Also, remember that not all journals are tagged equally, so some publishers may not have the tags for these limiters or filters to be caught.
-- many databases allow for the use of field codes - this allows for targeted searches in specific areas of an article’s content. In CINAHL (example below) we have ‘SO Publication name’ and in PubMed, it's ‘Journal’. Search these fields for keywords such as Nurse, Nurses, or Nursing to filter out likely nursing journals.
This technique will filter out those journals that do not have Nurse in the title. So again, you may miss some but it does get you a step closer.
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