Nursing

Links to the sites to help you with your Basic Research Needs.

Resources for searching for grey literature, the materials not published through traditional commercial or academic distribution methods.

Refereed or Peer Reviewed Journals

Refereed and Peer Reviewed mean the same thing. A journal that is Refereed or Peer Reviewed has a board of specialists that check submitted papers to make sure their citations are accurate and the research methods are sound before the article is published.

There are several ways to check whether a journal is Refereed or Peer Reviewed.

• Some online journal indexes/databases give you a way to limit your search to Peer Reviewed, Refereed or Scholarly articles. Check the information link (looks like a white i in a blue circle) next to the index/database name on our Articles, Databases page and look under Refereed Journal Filter for instructions on limiting your search to Peer Reviewed, Refereed or Scholarly articles.
• If you are using an index/database that does not give you a way to limit your search to Peer Reviewed, Refereed or Scholarly articles you can still find out whether or not a journal is Peer Reviewed, Refereed or Scholarly by using Ulrich's Periodical Directory. Open our link to Ulrich's Periodical Directory (which can be found on our Articles, Databases page) and type the name of the journal in the search box. When the list of journals matching your search words appears, find the journal on the list. If the journal is Peer Reviewed, Refereed or Scholarly there will be an icon that looks like a very styalized M next to the title (see the legend box at the top of the results screen if you need an example of the icon).
• The third method of checking whether a journal is Peer Reviewed, Refereed or Scholarly only works if the library owns a paper copy of the journal. If the library has a current issue of the journal in paper form, you can check the information page of the journal and it will tell you whether or not the journal is Peer Reviewed, Refereed or Scholarly.

Boolean Operators

APA Citation

Click the link below for a quick PowerPoint on APA citation format.

Exporting PubMed Citations to EndNote Web

1. Do your search in PubMed.
2. Mark the results you wish to Export to EndNote Web.
3. Click the Send To: button on the top right side of your Search Results and choose FILE as your destination.
4. When the Format box appears, choose MEDLINE and click Create File.
5. On the File Download box, click SAVE.
6. Choose Desktop as save location, name text document or leave it as pubmed_result.txt and click SAVE.
7. To import into EndNote Web, open EndNote Web and login.
8. Choose Collect > Import References
9. Browse your file name and choose the file you downloaded from PubMed.
10. Choose filter PubMed.
11. Choose the file for your results.
12. Click Import.

Searching for Doctoral Dissertations

There are several major indexes to doctoral dissertations. Not all Universities are covered by any one of these sources. To be thorough, all of them should be searched.

Provides open access graduate theses and dissertations published around the world. Metadata (information about the theses) comes from over 1100 colleges, universities, and research institutions.

Comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses from around the world, offering millions of works from thousands of universities. Full-text coverage spans from 1743 to the present, with citation coverage dating back to 1637.

Google Scholar indexes doctoral dissertations and master's theses housed on open access scholarly sites such as Boise State University's ScholarWorks.