Resources for Publishing
- School of Nursing Scholarly Communications GuideVisit our Health Sciences Library Scholarly Communication guide for the School of Nursing to learn more about journal selection and the publication process.
- HSL Scientific Writing GuideOur full HSL guide to publishing, writing, and scholarly communications.
- Where to Publish EBP or QI ArticlesSelected list of nursing journals that publish evidence-based practice and quality improvement articles.
- SQUIRE StatementSQUIRE guidelines on publishing quality improvement reports.
Background vs. Foreground Questions
- Background vs. Foreground QuestionsSlides covering background and foreground questions
Other Resources
- e-JournalsSearch a complete list of all our journals. If you have a citation, use this link to find full-text.
- e-BooksSearch our books; read online and download PDFs.
- LibraLibra is the University of Virginia’s open access institutional repository, the online archive of scholarship created by the University community. It provides a central, stable location for the scholarly output of the University community (journal articles, datasets, theses/dissertations, etc.).
- Directory of Nursing Journals | INANE - International Academy of Nursing EditorsINANE's directory includes a list of reputable nursing journals and their contacts.
- Nursing Theory and FrameworksLooking for more information on nursing theory and frameworks? Follow the link to our guide.
School of Nursing Resources
DNP Resources
Getting Started
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.
Looking for more information about PRISMA?
Databases (Answering Foreground Questions)
Use these databases to perform literature searches and find articles.
- PubMed This link opens in a new windowProvides access to over 30 million citations for the biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books, selected publishers, and the PubMed Central repository.
- CINAHL This link opens in a new window
Provides citations and selected full text for the top nursing and allied health literature available and covers a wide range of topics including nursing, biomedicine, alternative/complementary medicine, consumer health and 17 allied health disciplines.
- Web of Science (WoS) This link opens in a new window
Broad inter-disciplinary search including medicine, life sciences, social sciences, and more. Searches journal literature and conference proceedings. Also used to determine citation data (e.g. times cited) for journal articles.
- PsycINFO This link opens in a new window
Database covers the professional and academic literature in psychology and related disciplines such as medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, and linguistics. Updated monthly.
- OVID Medline This link opens in a new windowProvides access to over 28 million citations for the biomedical literature, covering biomedical research, clinical medicine, nursing, allied health, and health policy. Includes In-Process & Other Non-Indexed Citations.
- Google Scholar This link opens in a new windowFind articles from most online scholarly journals plus some books and Web sites.
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new windowFor topics reaching outside of nursing and healthcare.
- Embase
Embase is a biomedical database that focuses on drugs and pharmacology, medical devices, clinical medicine, and basic science relevant to clinical medicine. It provides access to bibliographic citations to more than 8,500 biomedical journal articles from over 95 countries. It also contains over 2.4 million conference abstracts indexed from more than 7,000 conferences dating from 2009 to the present, and full-text indexing of drug, disease, and medical device data. It has especially strong coverage on drug trials. Over 1.5 million records are added yearly, with an average of over 6,000 each day.
- Scopus
Scopus is an abstract and citation database that indexes content from more than 25,000 active titles and 7,000 publishers—all rigorously vetted and selected by an independent review board.
Levels of Evidence
The levels of evidence pyramid provides a way to visualize both the quality of evidence and the amount of evidence available. Evidence is broken down into three categories: Critical Appraisal (filtered), Experimental & Observational Studies (unfiltered), and Background Information. As you go down the pyramid, the amount of evidence increases as the quality of the evidence decreases.