NU 412/413: RN to BSN

Information in your field is available through a variety of sources. In NU 412 and NU 413 you will identify what type of document will satisfy the information need or question that you have. If you know what type of document you need, then you will know where you are going to start your search.

When you are assigned a research paper you will need to use the library’s resources to gather high quality evidence. These include articles from magazines and journals and are more specifically described as:

• Research articles are published in journals. The researchers who conduct a study such as a clinical trial will write the research article to disseminate their findings.The studies are constructed by a wide variety of different methodologies but all of them will be described in an article with the same setup: abstract, introduction, method, results, discussion, conclusion, and a reference list.
• Review articles are published in journals. They describe the findings of research studies but are not written by the researchers who conducted the study. Rather, a review will put the evidence from one or more recently published studies into context so that practitioners are advised as to how to apply the new knowledge.
• Editorials from magazines and journals may offer the insight of an expert in the field, but is usually only one or two pages of opinion. 

Current information in the healthcare field can be found in magazines and journals. These two types of publications have commonalities but are not the same thing. 

• The magazine articles that are particular to medical databases are often from specialized trade publications (such as Hearing Health) or they are published by professional, nonprofit, or government organizations (such as Harvard Women's Health Watch or Bulletin of the World Health Organization). The articles from magazines are accurate and convey valid points but they do not go through a peer review process and are not considered scholarly. 
• Medical/nursing databases contain mostly journals, which contain mostly academic, scholarly, or peer reviewed articles. When working on a research paper, you want to find journal articles from important publications such as American Journal of Nursing or the Journal of the American Medical Association.