• Home

• Module One:

  • Beginner's Research Guide

    • Searching Steps

    • Locating Books

    • Locating Article Citations

    • Finding Journals

    • Database Tutorials

• Module Two

  • Research Utilization and Evidence-Based Practice

    • publication types

    • search strategies

    • limit your search

    • specialized databases

    • evidence-based journals

    • clinical guidelines

    • web sites

• Module Three

  • Searching the Web

    • sites and meta sites

    • free vs. fee-based sites

    • search engines

    • web directories

    • the invisible web

    • consumer health info

    • evaluating the web

• Getting Help

Research Utilization and Evidence-Based Practice | search strategies

Search strategies can be designed for the CINAHL and MEDLINE databases that use specialized terms to retrieve high quality studies. When designing a search strategy there are two components to be considered:

• Subject content
• Methodology

For a question like: "Is there evidence to support the effective use of therapeutic touch?" a CINAHL search on the subject heading Therapeutic touch retrieves more than 500 articles, but when you limit the search by publication type, restricting the results by methodology, you retrieve higher quality studies.

Here is an example of a simple search in CINAHL:

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