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Nursing and Allied Health Information Resource Guide: Home

This research guide highlights some resources used for locating information. In addition to the resources below, please consult the Online Catalog or a Reference Librarian.

Welcome!

Thank you for visiting the online guide for Nursing and Allied Health! The different tabs are organized to help you find information and provide research assistance. Please contact the library to receive assistance from research experts. 

Find Books

The NSU library catalog list books under author, title and subject.  You may also perform a call number search as R, RB, RC, RD, RG, RJ,RM, RT.  The following subject headings should contain useful information.

R --   General Medicine
RB -- Pathology
RC -- Internal Medicine
RD -- Surgery
RG -- Gynecology and Obstetrics
RJ --  Pediatrics
RM -- Therapeutics. Pharmacology
RT --  Nursing

Search strategies

Keyword searching is good when:

  • You don’t know the professional term to use for your search.  This is the name you assign to the idea.
  • You are searching in two or more databases at the same time
  • The term may be related to a new theory or idea that may not be included in the controlled vocabulary
  • May appear in the title, abstract, or the full text of the article (depending on how the database is set up to search)

Controlled Vocabulary searching is good when:

  • You are searching in only one database
  • There is a thesaurus or index of the controlled vocabulary available for you to consult (online or in print)
  • If you know the term or can find it in an article citation or book record, your subject search will be more focused

Shortcuts

  • Truncation – to pull various versions of the same word, use the word root and a wild card symbol. 
    • Parent* will find: parent, parents, parenting, parental
  • Synonyms should be enclosed in parentheses
    • (teen* or juvenile* or adolesc* or youth)
  • Phrases – for most databases, enclose a phrase in quotation marks to indicate that the word should be searched together
    • “teen pregnancy” or “market share”

Logical operators (Boolean operators) – connecting your ideas in the search

  • or-- use with synonyms to expand the number of “hits”  (teenagers or adolescents)
  • and--use to limit the number of hits.  The results of an “and” search must include  all of the terms linked together with the “and”  (teenagers and pregnancy).   Each additional “and” (subject, language, publication year)  makes the result set smaller.
  • not--excludes information (art not sculpture)