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COURSE RELATED RESEARCH INSTRUCTION

Course Name: NUR362 Care of Adults 1
Course Instructor: Maureen Condon
Session Librarian: Holly Heller-Ross
Session Date: September 2005

Finding qualitative nursing research articles on chronic illness:

Step 1) select the CINAHL database from the library's subject database menu, or use the links below.

Library Research Tools

Articles in Databases

Nursing & Allied Health: CINAHL (via EBSCO)
Indexes major health professions journals.

Step1) uncheck the box Suggest Subject Terms

Step 2) search using the phrase "living with chronic illness", review the results. Here's one example .

Step 2) Redo the search, this time with the Suggest Subject Terms box checked. Search for chronic illness as a term, you'll notice that the database thesaurus suggests the preferred term Chronic Disease.
If you search chronic disease, you'll get much more specific results. 

Step 3) Refine your search results, by clicking on the Refine tab, and select publication type Research.

Step 4) Further refine your results by typing in the term Qualitative, then search again. The database does not allow you to select publication type Qualitative Research, so we have to search this as a free-text term. It does work!

Step 5) Review your search results, select interesting titles, read through the abstracts such as the one below, looking for articles that would be useful to you. Many articles will be full-text, right there in the database, some you'll need to get in a library or use the Interlibrary Loan Link.

This page created by: Holly Heller-Ross, Associate Librarian
Email: holly.hellerross@plattsburgh.edu
Last Updated:  Sept 7, 2005