BIO 176 Lab

When searching in CINAHL, take advantage of some of the search features.

1. Search boxes: Try searching for the name of your disease or condition as well as the name of your intervention. Different combinations of search terms will give you different results, so you might need to try multiple combinations.

2. Limiters: Below are some limiters you might find helpful. Scroll down in CINAHL to see them all.

a. Full-text: This will show you articles the library has access to.

b. Date:  Your professor might give you a date range in your assignment.  If not, you might have to make your own decision.

c. Peer-reviewed (scholarly):  This indicates the the article went through a peer reviewed process and is a criteria your professor might ask you to include.

d. English language: This will only show you articles available in English.

e. Research article:  This will help you find research articles.  You will still need to look at the article to confirm it is original research.  The easiest way to do this is to look at the methods section and see how the study was set-up.  If the author conducted the study himself, it is probably a research article.

3. Ask a SJU Librarian: This feature allows you to chat with a SJU librarian or submit a question, if a librarian is not available.

Some other suggested tips that might assist you include.

Boolean operators

• AND:  By default, the database will try to find all of the words you put into the search boxes.  You can see the AND before the second line in CINAHL.
• OR:  Since hypertension could also be called high blood pressure, you could choose to use OR to indicate that you want results with either hypertension OR high blood pressure.

In the example above, CINAHL would find results with beta blockers AND either hypertension OR high blood pressure.

Quotation marks

Again, by default CINAHL will look for all of the words you listed, but they do not have to be in the order that you listed them.  If you put words in quotation marks, such as "high blood pressure" those words have to be found next to each other.

Primary sources are ones where you are hearing from someone directly involved with the information.  For example, the author of the article was the one who performed the research experiment.

Look for the Methods section in the article to see what method was used.  You want the methods section to indicate the author was the one doing the experiment and not analyzing the work of others.  If you do not see a methods section or the article title has something like literature review, systematic review, or meta-analysis in it, look for other options.  There is more information on primary sources here: https://guides.sju.edu/SNAH_orientation/primary You can also schedule an appointment with a librarian in Starfish for assistance.

These sources will help you read and understand the different sections of a scholarly journal article.

This video from Case Western University will help you more efficiently read a scholarly article.

Need help with APA formatting, references, and citations?  Check out the library's APA guide: https://guides.sju.edu/APA  You can also schedule an appointment with a librarian in Starfish.

Please note that many healthcare websites have organizations as authors.  Citation generators might not be able to detect that, meaning you will want to edit those references to include the organizational author.  The organizational author will also be used in the in-text citations.