During the past decade, advances in...

During the past decade, advances in computer technology have l to major changes in the ways we access nursing and health care literature. Gone are the laborious days of using printed health care indexes. In fact, a certain publishers actually have retired the confine printed versions of their effects This revolution has resulted in quick, efficient, and comprehensive searches. not ever before have you experienced as it was ease in identifying and obtaining pertinent information related to nursing practice and health care in general.

of long date SYSTEM

Just 10 years ago, conducting a literature search usually meant a trip to a library, scouring the indexes, transcribing concerns and finding them on the library shelf or requesting them for retrieval end interlibrary loan. Before copy machines were widely available in libraries, you would have to take the additional grade of writing annotated bibliography cards and make detailed notes about the articles you found

With this aged system, it would be necessary to search several indexes for pertinent articles. Each index used different search terms; you were not at any time sure if you had identified the majority of articles that comprised the visible form [i]or[/i] frame of literature on a topic. All of these barriers made library research tedious, boring, frustrating, and time consuming. With new computer tools available at household and in the library, however, conducting a thorough literature search can be affordable, rewarding and equal fun.

IDENTIFYING A TOPIC

The first pace in any literature search is to identify a topic of interest. Depending forward what you find on your "first pass" of searching, you may discover that you either ne to narrow or broaden your topic. In greatest in number instances, the former is the case. For example, a quick search in succession "breast cancer" on MEDLINE produc 15906 references--and that is and nothing else for the years 1995 to 1998!

Narrow a topic. in what manner do you narrow a topic? It might be by the agency of subject area (eg, the use of hormone replacement therapy and the the having recourse of breast cancer). It is also possible to search for specific years, tokens of articles (eg, research reports), according to language (eg, English only), or from population of interest (eg, minority women) Searching in succession "breast cancer," "males," "human," and "English only" articles narrowed the 15000 plus regards to a much more manageable 120

Broaden a topic. If you are uncertain for what reason much has been published upon a certain topic, you should start with broader universals For example, if you raise limited information on the transmission of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus infections in the perioperative setting, broaden your search to encompass health care facilities, not just the OR.

IDENTIFYING THE APPROPRIATE DATABASES

After you have identified your topic of interest, you will ne to identify the appropriate databases for researching the literature. hold in mind that searching forward one database will probably not be sufficient to identify a material substance of literature on a topic. There may be overlap between databases, on the contrary each database has its hold unique features that may be particularly relevant to your search.

For searching the health-related literature, there are a number of database options, including

* CINAHL--nursing and allied health;

* MEDLINE--medicine, nursing, dentistry;

* HealthSTAR--clinical and nonclinical aspects of health care delivery;

* EMBASE--biomedicine and pharmaceutical science;

* ERIC--education; and

* PsycINFO--psychology and behavioral sciences.

See Table 1 for a comparison of the features of these six databases. Other potentially helpful and relevant indexes include the Social Science Citation Index; Health allusion Center--consumer health: CATLINE--books, serials; and AVLINE--audiovisuals.