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Evidence Based Nursing Practice

PubMed

PubMed is a free web-based interface for searching MEDLINE.

  • PubMed is created by the National Library of Medicine, and contains the MEDLINE database.
  • It covers journal articles in medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and the health care system.
  • PubMed has information about journal articles(currently over 24 million) published in 5,600 journals in 30 languages dating back to 1946.
  • It does not include information about meeting abstracts, conference proceedings, dissertations, patents, or websites.
  • NLM indexers add words called Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) to the information about each article. Searching with MeSH words helps you find more relevant articles.

 

PubMed Homepage

  • You can learn more about PubMed by exploring the links provided on the PubMed homepage.
  • Go to PubMed
  • PubMed Central  - PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). 

PubMed Record Example

Below is an image of a PubMed article record. Labels were added to explain the information that PubMed provides about the article:

  • Journal Name Abbreviation
  • Publication Date
  • Volume/Issue#, pages 
  • Article title
  • Author last name with first and middle initials
  • Author affiliation
  • Abstract
  • Links to comments 
  • Links to assigned index terms.

Remember: PubMed does NOT include the full-text of articles in its database--it links out to them. PubMed only searches the information about the article(including title and abstract), not the full-text of the article.  

SAMPLE ABSTRACT FROM PUBMED

Mackey A, Bassendowski S. The History of Evidence-Based Practice in Nursing Education and Practice. J Prof Nurs. 2017 Jan-Feb;33(1):51-55. doi: 10.1016/j.profnurs.2016.05.009. Epub 2016 May 18. PMID: 28131148.

The History of Evidence-Based Practice in Nursing Education and Practice

April Mackey 1, Sandra Bassendowski 

 

Abstract

Beginning with Florence Nightingale in the 1800s and evolving again within the medical community, evidence-based practice continues to advance along with the nursing discipline. Evidence-based practice is foundational to undergraduate and graduate nursing education and is a way for the nursing discipline to minimize the theory to practice gap. This article discusses the concept of evidence-based practice from a historical perspective as it relates to nursing in the educational and practice domains. The concept evidence-based practice is defined, and the similarities and differences to evidence-based medicine are discussed. It is crucial that registered nurses be proactive in their quest for research knowledge, so the gap between theory and practice continues to close. Utilizing nursing best practice guidelines, reviewing and implementing applicable research evidence, and taking advantage of technological advances are all ways in which nursing can move forward as a well-informed discipline.

Keywords: Education; Evidence-based nursing; Nursing history; Practice.

Database Search Strategies

Identify alternative and keywords to describe each PICO component.

This allows the database to search for relevant articles that may have been indexed using one other alternative words.  These words and terms can (and should) come from many sources, including everyday language and database thesauri.  

Consider the following questions to uncover alternative and keywords for each component: 

 

Population

Who is the patient? What is the population or disorder of interest? What are key characteristics of the patient, problem or population? What health concerns are of interest? 

 

Intervention

What is the intervention or event? What therapeutic, diagnostic, preventative or other health care actions or processes of interest? What do you want to do for the patient or population?  

 

Comparison (if applicable)

Is there an alternative intervention? What is the intervention being compared to?

Outcome

What is the effect of the treatment/intervention? What are the results of the intervention? What are you trying to accomplish, improve, or effect?

Tip: Consult the MeSH thesaurus at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh.

MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) is the controlled vocabulary thesaurus that indexers at the U.S. National Library of Medicine use to classify articles in PubMed. MeSH terms are also used by many other nursing and health research databases

MeSH Tutorial - https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/disted/meshtutorial/introduction/index.html

Tip: Keep a record of the words used in your search.

MeSH

MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary.

  • It is used for indexing articles for MEDLINE/PubMed.
  • MeSH terminology provides a consistent way to retrieve information that may use different terminology for the same concepts. 
  • It pulls together all articles on a concept including synonyms (myocardial infarction/heart attack) and allows for spelling variations (estrogen/oestrogen).

  • The MesH database link may be found at the Pubmed home page under Resources.

  • It may also be found at the Advanced Search page by scrolling down to More Resources.

When searching for a MeSH term (as Heart), the results will include

  • Subheadings
    (if none are selected, results will include results with or without the subheadings;
    if two(2) or more are selected, then results will include only citations that include all the subheadings selected)
     
  • Entry terms (MeSH synonyms, as Hearts for MeSH term heart)

Refine a search through these options


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  • See also terms  (as Myocardium  for MeSH term Heart)

 

Free Sources for Evidence Bases Information

FREE EBP Databases

These databases contain evidence and are free and open to the public.