Databases
- CINAHL Plus with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Covers English-language journals in the fields of nursing and allied health. Full-text access provided to more than 270 journals.
- PubMed This link opens in a new window
Covers over 35 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals back to 1946, with links to full text articles and other related resources.
- Web of Science This link opens in a new window
A citation database with multidisciplinary coverage in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities. Contains over 150 million records. Includes international proceedings coverage for over 120,000 conferences.
Searching Tutorials
This section details the mechanics of performing an EBP literature search. The specific terminology will vary from database to database (PubMed and MEDLINE use MeSH, while CINAHL uses CINAHL Headings, for instance) but the process is the same: you will search each individual component of your PICO question and combine the results using the Boolean AND operator. Select your database in the left column and learn how to search them in the tutorials below!
- Using MeSH for Subject Searching
This tutorial demonstrates how to: Search for and assess MeSH terms for usability; Create multifaceted searches in PubMed using a combination of MeSH, keywords, and synonyms; and Combine multiple concepts using the PubMed Advanced Search Builder.
Clinical Queries
One tool specifically assisting EBP searches is PubMed's Clinical Queries, which allows you to narrow your results by Clinical Study Category (Therapy, Etiology, Prognosis, Diagnosis, Clinical Prediction Guides). It also separates outs results identified as Systematic Reviews. This will not provide comprehensive results (it is unlikely to show every Systematic Review on a given topic), but if you need an article in a hurry to answer a specific clinical question, input your full search string into Clinical Queries:
- PubMed Clinical Queries***This link may not include Find It! Button***
Can be useful to build a search in the "normal"section of PubMed (especially if you want to use MeSH terms) and then paste the search string into this page.
