In your Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) project, utilizing scholarly information is essential, especially for quality improvement or evidence-based project implementation. Begin by conducting comprehensive literature reviews to identify relevant research, theories, and best practices. Use scholarly databases and peer-reviewed journals to gather evidence informing your project's design, methodology, and interventions. Evaluate the credibility, relevance, and applicability of the literature to your context and population. Incorporating evidence-based guidelines and frameworks strengthens the theoretical foundation of your DNP project and enhances its potential impact on healthcare outcomes. Grounding your work in scholarly information not only validates its rigor but also contributes to nursing knowledge and practice.
Searching for scholarly information using the PICO framework involves a structured approach to formulating clinical questions and identifying relevant evidence for evidence-based practice. PICO stands for Population, Intervention, Comparison, and Outcome.
To search for scholarly information using PICO:
By following the PICO framework and conducting systematic searches using relevant keywords and databases, you can effectively find scholarly information to inform evidence-based practice and clinical decision-making.
Subject headings are standardized terms used to categorize and index scholarly articles based on their content. They provide a controlled vocabulary that helps organize literature in databases, making it easier for researchers to find relevant information on specific topics. Subject headings are typically assigned by database indexers or authors during the publication process and are used to describe the main themes, concepts, and subjects covered in an article. By using subject headings, researchers can conduct more precise and efficient searches, improving the accuracy and relevance of their results when exploring scholarly literature.
Once you have identified the key concepts of your research question (see "Developing a Question"), you can use those concepts to develop keywords for your search strategy. The following tips and techniques will help you design a precise and relevant search strategy.
Keywords are any words you might use to search the record of an article, book, or other material in library databases. The database searches through the metadata (such as title, authors, publication, abstract, etc.) to find resources that contain the word you searched, and may also search through the full text of the material.
Keywords are most successful when you're searching for the words that the authors use to describe the research topic, as most databases will search for those specific words within the record of the article. To increase your chance of returning relevant results, consider all of the words that might be used to describe the research you're trying to find, and try some of these out in sample searches to determine which words return the best results.
Search Tips - Keywords
Use Boolean operators to combine keywords for more precise search results.
AND - If the term must be included in your search:
influenza AND vaccine
OR - If terms are interchangeable, i.e. synonyms. Place OR'd terms within parentheses:
(influenza OR flu) AND vaccine
NOT - If a term should not be included in your search. This Boolean operator is rarely necessary for literature reviews.
(influenza OR flu) AND vaccine NOT H1N1
Note how we've used parentheses in the examples above. Search strings like these are similar to mathematical equations, where you perform the actions within the parentheses before proceeding from left to right to run the search. For example, using the search [(influenza OR flu) AND vaccine] will find results that have a term relating to influenza/flu, as well as the term vaccine.
If we moved the parentheses, it would be a very different search. [influenza OR (flu AND vaccine)] will provide results that use the term influenza, as well as results that use both the terms flu and vaccine. This means you would get results having to do with influenza but perhaps nothing to do with vaccination.
Here are a few examples of how this search would be different depending on the arrangement of booleans and keywords. The area highlighted in pink represents the search results that would be returned with this search.
(vaccine AND influenza) OR (influenza AND flu) OR (vaccine AND flu)
(influenza OR flu) AND vaccine
flu OR (vaccine AND influenza)
Truncation allows you to quickly include all variations of a word in your search. Use the root of the keyword and add an asterisk (*). For example:
nurs* = nurse, nurses, nursing, nursery
IMPORTANT: Notice that "nursery" is also retrieved in the above search. Truncation will save you from having to include a large number of synonyms, but it will also add a certain number of irrelevant results. You can limit this effect by using the NOT Boolean operator, i.e. NOT nursery.
Wild cards allow you to replace a letter in a keyword to retrieve all variations of the spelling. For example:
p?ediatric = pediatric, paediatric
Databases are online collections of information, such as scholarly articles, newspapers, etc. There are three of the most common databases listed below that you can use as part of your search process. These databases sometimes hold the full text of the articles, but often they act as indexes, which include metadata about the article (such as title, abstract), but not the article itself. When this happens, there is a "Find it at WSU" button that will bring you into the library's subscriptions to identify where the full text lives. Expect to find and use this button often, as we have a wealth of information available across many different databases. Even when a given article is not available immediately, this "Find it at WSU" button will bring you to the option to "Get it For Me", an easy way to request the article through interlibrary loan. This process is often very quick, and there is no cost to request articles.