Listen to Benedict!

As developing professionals, your opinions and ideas are not enough in your academic work. Your thinking requires support from experts in the field and evidence from research and practice. The Library provides you with resources not available through regular, online searching. Its databases contain millions of discipline-specific articles from highly impactful journals in the field of Nursing. To meet the academic requirements of your program, you will need to learn to use Library databases to explore your field and find current and relevant research to boost your academic | scholarly writing.

Knowing where to start with your research is an important step. Knowing how to search those resources is critical. The next few pages walk you through building a solid search. A successful search saves you hours of time combing through irrelevant, out-of-date, and biased information.

While the walk-through uses a generic search, consider mimicking the steps with your own information need e.g., upcoming assignment or presentation for which you need research.

Your first instinct would be to dive in. Taking a step back and learning how to build a search will serve you well with database searching. As with most things, the first time through may be time-consuming. But putting in the time now will save it for each research need across your program and beyond!