APA Format
Publication Manual (OFFICIAL) 7th Edition of the American Psychological Association by ISBN: 1433832178Publication Date: 2019-10-01A print copy of the APA Publication Manual 7th edition is available in the reference section for you to consult while working in the Health Sciences Library.
- Purdue OWL APA GuidePurdue University's Online Writing Lab has a nice guide to APA formatting, updated for the 7th edition.
Formulating a Searchable Question
There are many frameworks for organizing your clinical question. PICOT is the framework that we often use in evidence-based practice.
The PICOT format asks us to focus on the key concepts that we're interested in, which will help us develop our strategy to search databases for evidence from peer-reviewed journal articles.
The elements of PICOT are:
P stands for patient population or disease of interest
I is for intervention or issue of interest
C is the comparison intervention - what you are comparing your proposed intervention to,
O is your desired outcome,
T refers to time involved to demonstrate your desired outcome
School of Nursing Resources
BSN Resources
Visit the library orientation for nursing students page to learn more about library resources.
Where to Find Information
If you're looking for background information on a clinical topic or answers to common clinical questions, consider some of these point-of-care sources.
Are you looking for information for a paper on a nurse theorist or another topic that doesn't require clinical research? You can find eBooks and more in Virgo, our library's catalog. Virgo will show you eBooks, print books, and more from all UVA libraries - you can use the filters to limit your search to just the Health Sciences Library.
Peer-reviewed journal articles can be found in a few different places. If you know the journal you want to read, you can find it in Browzine. If you want to search many peer-reviewed journals at once, choose databases with appropriate coverage for your topic.
Essential Databases for BSN Students
- CINAHL This link opens in a new windowThe Cumulative Index for Nursing and Allied Health provides citations for journal articles in nursing and allied health. This is a core nursing database, used in the EBP Project. It's also a good choice to search for peer-reviewed journal articles for other BSN assignments.
- PubMed This link opens in a new windowThis core biomedical database has over 30 million citations and is a great place to start a literature search. This is another database used in the EBP project.
- Web of Science (WoS) This link opens in a new windowBroad inter-disciplinary search including medicine, life sciences, social sciences, and more. Searches journal literature and conference proceedings, used in the EBP project.
- Cochrane Library This link opens in a new windowA collection of databases that contain high-quality, independent evidence to support healthcare decision making. Includes full-text access to the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, as well as the full-records from DARE, Health Technology Assessment Database (HTA), and NHS Economic Evaluation Database (NHS EED). Used in the EBP project.
- Google Scholar This link opens in a new windowFind articles from most online scholarly journals plus some books and Web sites. Google scholar can be a great place to learn about a new topic as you're starting your search, but it shouldn't take the place of the other peer-reviewed journal databases above.
How to Obtain Full-Text Articles
Database searches provide bibliographic citations - information about articles, such as their titles, abstracts, author names, etc. Sometimes, the full text of an article is also available because we subscribe to the journal that the article is contained in.
Consider installing the LibKey Nomad extension on your browser. This extension makes it easy to obtain PDFs of full-text articles in one click, although it won't work with all databases. Review the "Connecting from Off-Grounds" page for more information about LibKey Nomad and other extensions that will help discover full-text PDFs.
If we don't have a subscription for the journal your article was published in, we can get a PDF of the article for you via interlibrary loan.
Getting Started with the Evidence-Based Practice Project
All good literature searches start with formulating a searchable question.
The citation manager Zotero will keep track of article references and other resource citations for your project.
UVA Library's Zotero Guide, their Zotero tutorial, and our HSL Zotero tips are all great places to start.
Covidence is a web-based review management application that will help streamline the screening and PRISMA flow diagram generation for your literature review. Be sure to sign up using this link to gain access to your institutional account with unlimited reviews.
Watch these short videos to get started:
Visit the Searching for and Appraising Evidence page for links to databases for your research, search tips, and database tutorials.
Review these tips for obtaining full-text PDFs of articles and access the library's subscription resources from off-grounds.
EBP Project: Learning How to Search for Evidence
Basic Principles of Database Searching
- MIT's Guide to SearchingThis written guide covers the basics of Boolean operators and other search syntax.
- Searching School Video TutorialsCarrie Price's series of 3-4 minute videos offers a great introduction to the principles of database searching from a health sciences librarian.
Database-Specific Tutorials