Prof. Tourelle’s NURS 4153 Class–

Quick links:
Scholarly versus Popular
Database Searching
Database Searching Tips
CINAHL Subject Headings
Interlibrary Loan
Class PowerPoint
Citation Help

Scholarly/academic literature versus popular literature

First, just a simple tip: scholarly/academic/peer-reviewed/referred all mean the same thing.

According to our library glossary, peer-reviewed means “articles reviewed and critiqued by noted experts (”peers”) in the same discipline; sometimes called ‘refereed’”library.uco.edu/sp/glossary/index.html

Thus when you’re taking a look at an article from Time or Scientific American, you’re not looking at scholarly articles. Instead, you’re looking at something called “popular literature” or news that is written for the general public about scholarly and or scientific studies, etc.

In short–

Peer-reviewed

• Written by a scholar or a researcher
• Written for academia
• Full documentation
• Original or primary research

Popular

• Written for general public
• Written by reporters or free-lance writers
• No or minimal documentation
• No original research- secondary literature

Database Searching

When you are in need of an scholarly source or even a popular source, you can turn to our library databases (which can be accessed on and off campus with your UCO email username and password).

The Library databases can be found at http://library.uco.edu/databases/

Once on the library databases’ page, you can sort the databases by subject using the upper left-hand corner drop-down box.

Thus, if you were looking for articles about a certain physical condition, you might choose Nursing or Health and Medicine.

If you were searching for mental conditions, you might choose Psychology as your subject…

Searching tips in our databases

Some cool things you can do to make your search more specific or to yield more results is to use advanced search operators.

One such operator is OR

OR will increase the number of results retrieved because it is looking for similar terms.

Thus, if you’re searching for steroids, you’re also searching for performance enhancing drugs, etc.

” “ will only search for words right next to each other.

It’s called a phrase search. If you want to do a search on performance enhancing drugs, you might want to put ” ” around the phrase like so “performance enhancing drugs”.

Otherwise the database will just look for those words separately; not necessarily next to each other.

Yet another trick is the * ending.

This is called the truncation or wildcard ending. Adding a * to a word like athlet* will search for the following words: athlete, athletes, athletics, atheletic, athletism, etc., etc.

CINAHL Subject Headings or MESH (Medical Subject Headings)

In class we looked at the following example from the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Searching CINAHL with Subject Headings handout (http://www.unmc.edu/library/guides/CINAHLHeadings.pdf):

Example: JD is a 55 year old male who is recovering from a spinal injury. He is currently immobilized and will be for several months. You have been asked to locate information on positioning an immobilized patient to prevent pressure ulcers.

We determined that our key terms or phrases for this example would be

1. positioning
2. pressure ulcers

Now, using our database tips above, we could do a keyword search in CINAHL but if we want to retrieve more relevant results we would turn to the CINAHL Subject Headings. Subject headings are controlled vocabulary. We use them in our library catalog (Library of Congress Subject Headings), we use them when we visit a clothing website such as JCrew.com or LandsEnd.com We follow that site’s controlled vocabulary or the terms and phrases that site has chosen to classify their contents.

For a quick tutorial video on why you might choose a subject heading search over a keyword search and how to set up such a search in CINAHL, please click on this link: http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cQnllFnSy

What if we don’t own a certain book, cd, dvd, article?

Interlibrary Loan

When you need a book or article that Chambers Library doesn’t own, Interlibrary Loan can usually borrow it for you from another library.

Two things to remember about Interlibrary Loan

1.) Allow 7 days!

2.) It’s free

To search for books, cds, dvds, etc. use WorldCat (http://library.uco.edu/cats/) then look for the “Interlibrary Loan” link in the section “External Resources” on your item’s record page.

For articles, usually when you pull up a result in the library’s databases that we don’t have access to, an ILL link will appear on the “Find It” button’s page. If not, please contact us at the Reference desk for assistance.

You can always fill out an ILL form online by first logging in athttp://eres.uco.edu/illiad/logon.html then choosing the appropriate form (”request a photocopy” or “request a book or visual material”).

My PowerPoint Shown in Class

Click on the following:

Using The Library For Nurs 4153

APA Citation Help

APA Style Guide – Consult our library guide for correct information on citing sources (http://library.ucok.edu/instruction/APA5th.pdf).

OWL (Online Writing Lab at Purdue) – Offers examples of citing sources using APA (http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/)

APA Website Gives updated information not included in the latest APA print manual (http://apastyle.apa.org/)

Knight Cite (http://www.calvin.edu/library/knightcite/) and Son of Citation Machine (http://citationmachine.net/)

Remember when using the automatic citation in EBSCOHost– Always check your results with the APA manual!!

Please remember that if you ever need a hand in with research, you can always contact us at the Reference desk via email, phone (405-974-2878), chat, or text! You can even comment on this blog’s posting and we’ll get back to you!

And, you can always email me personally @ alemon2@uco.edu!

I’ll see you around the library!

Amanda