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Nursing research & APA citation: Identify Keywords

Find evidence-based scholarly nursing and medical articles and cite them using APA

Add relevant words

  • First try: [puppy]
  • More precise: [puppy training]
  • Even more precise: [large breed puppy training class]

It may take several attempts to find the right words to describe your topic.

Try other words 

  • Not ideal: [my head hurts]
  • Not ideal: [why is my head killing me]
  • Better: [headache]

Use only the important words

Too many words will limit your results:

  • Not ideal[country where bats are an omen of good luck]
  • Better: [bats good luck]

Use quotation marks...

to search for an exact phrase to narrow results.

  • Less precise: [medical error] without quotations retrieves results with those two words anywhere in the document
  • More precise: ["medical error"] finds results only for that exact phrase.

Use an asterisk (*) as a truncation symbol to search for all endings to a word. 

  • [mexic*] searches for Mexico, Mexican, Mexicana, Mexicano, and Mexicans
  • [nurs*] searches for nurses, nursing, and nurse
  • [oncolo*] searches for oncologist, and oncology

Attribution

This resource is adapted from UWG's version adapted by Andrea Baer, Anne Barnhart, CJ Ivory, and Craig Schroer. The original content was from The Indiana University Bloomington Library DIY project created by Andrea Baer and Julia Davis, which was adapted from the original Portland State University Library DIY project created by Meredith Farkas, Amy Hofer, Lisa Molinelli, and Kimberly Willson-St. Clair. 

Creative Commons License CC by NC 4.0  This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

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