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Nursing Research Guide

Guidance for Nurses and Allied Health Researchers

Introduction to College Research

If you are very new to college-level research, consider learning more with this OER (Open Education Research) textbook, Introduction to College Research, by Butler, Sargent, and Smith.

Preparing for class

Nurse 102  will help you master the essential skills of nursing research; however, you will need to already know how to use the library website, and have some basic library research skills.

If you haven't yet mastered these skills, consider completing all three levels of of our Library Research Tutorials.

We also offer video tutorials for using specific databases and tools. 

Citation

The best resource to ensure you are forming APA style citations correctly is the American Psychological Association itself. Their books and their website are your best authority to know how to cite correctly. The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Seventh Edition is available at the OC Libraries and the APA Style website is openly available.

Citation generators can be a useful tool. Library databases often provide citations, as does PubMed. Zbib from Zotero is a remarkably accurate ad-free and open source citation generator. Regardless of which citation generator you use as a first step, you will always need to carefully inspect each citation and fix any errors. Check:

  • Does the font color, size, and style match the rest of your paper?
  • Do you need to remove highlighting or other formatting?
  • Does the citation have hanging indentation?
  • Are the lines double spaced, match the rest of your paper?
  • Are the author names listed and punctuated correctly?
  • Is the date included and correctly punctuated?
  •  For journal articles- does the article title have sentence case capitalization and the journal title have title case capitalization and italics?
  • Have you included the journal volume, issue, and page numbers, if they exist? 
  • Have you included a DOI or URL for digital journal or eBook resources? Present DOIs as hyperlinks. If there is no DOI, include an active direct URL. Otherwise cite the article or book as if  it is print.

Get to know APA citation guidelines well enough that you can find and correct the errors in machine generated citations.

Here are some helpful resources:

Sample Papers- APA Style Guidance

APA 7th Edition Handouts and Guides

Look at the machine-generated APA 7th Edition citations below. Ignore the lack of hanging indentation, each one should have that, but...

Only one of these is correct. Can you spot the errors?

 

Citation generated by CINAHL Complete (EBSCO)-

Jefferies, D., McNally, S., Roberts, K., Wallace, A., Stunden, A., D’Souza, S., & Glew, P. (2018). The importance of academic literacy for undergraduate nursing students and its relationship to future professional clinical practice: A systematic review. Nurse Education Today, 60, 84–91. https://ezproxy.olympic.edu:2118/10.1016/j.nedt.2017.09.020

Citation generated by OneSearch-

Jefferies, D., McNally, S., Roberts, K., Wallace, A., Stunden, A., D’Souza, S., & Glew, P. (2018). The importance of academic literacy for undergraduate nursing students and its relationship to future professional clinical practice: A systematic review. Nurse Education Today, 60, 84–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2017.09.020

Citation generated by Google Scholar- 

Jefferies, D., McNally, S., Roberts, K., Wallace, A., Stunden, A., D'Souza, S., & Glew, P. (2018). The importance of academic literacy for undergraduate nursing students and its relationship to future professional clinical practice: A systematic review. Nurse Education Today, 60, 84-91.

Citation generated by PubMed-

Jefferies, D., McNally, S., Roberts, K., Wallace, A., Stunden, A., D'Souza, S., & Glew, P. (2018). The importance of academic literacy for undergraduate nursing students and its relationship to future professional clinical practice: A systematic review. Nurse education today, 60, 84–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2017.09.020

 

There are almost always errors, not to mention you need to double-space each line and ensure the font size, style, and color match your page.

 

APA Style 7th Edition Practice

Take the citation corresponding to the number you were assigned in class and correct it.

APA Style Reference Formatting Activity

We will review as a group and then compare our success to the correct versions on the 

APA Style Guide to Common Reference Examples

 

Understanding Systematic Reviews

Tutorials for Databases

CINAHL Complete Tutorial- Finding Evidence-Based Practice Articles in CINAHL  

CINAHL/MeSH Tutorial- Using MeSH in EBSOhost

MEDLINE (EBSCOhost) Tutorial- Advanced Medical Searching

PubMed Tutorial- Find Articles on a Topic

PubMed Advanced Search Tutorial- Using the Advanced Search Builder