Database Tutorials

Nursing and Allied Health

Overview

For broad help with searching, finding full text, creating citations, and saving articles for later, please see the ProQuest Central page.

Searching with MeSH Terms

Sometimes it's helpful to search using the Medical Subject Heading terms - these are words that are standardized across the medical discipline so researchers (including you) have an easier time finding all the relevant information they need. Nursing and Allied Health makes it easy to incorporate these terms into your search, or limit your results to include only the terms you want.

From Advanced Search

In the middle of the page, there's a Search box labeled "MeSH Subject". You can either:

1. Start typing your terms into that box and select an option from the autocomplete list that will automatically appear once you start typing
2. Click on "Look up MeSH subjects" to the right of that box
   • Another box will appear on your screen that looks like this:
   • 

   • To add these terms to your search string back in the database, click the checkboxes next to the terms you'd like to include. Then choose whether you'd like to combine them with OR, AND, or NOT, and then click "Add to Search".

     • AND: will only display results that include both/all the search terms
     • OR: will display all results with either/any of the search terms

   • You'll be brought back to the Advanced Search screen, with your terms added into the search box

From the Results Page

You can also choose to search as normal and then limit your results to only items with certain MeSH terms.

On the left side of the page with your other limiters, scroll to "Mesh", then select the term you'd like to include.

If you want to include more than one term, click on the "More Options..." link, and then select the checkboxes next to each term you'd like to include (or exclude).

Searching Tips for Nursing

Date of publication

• From the Advanced Search page:
  • Scroll down until you see "Publication Date"
  • Select an option from the dropdown menu ("After this date..." is probably the most helpful for you)
  • Type in the year in the box provided, and search as normal

• From the Results page:
  • On the left side of your screen, there is a "Limit To" column
  • Scroll down a little until you see a bar graph with dates, with "Publication Date" above
  • Click and drag the bar until you see the dates you'd like to use, or click "Enter date range" below and type in the number in the box.

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Age of Population

• You MUST do this from the Advanced Search page! There is no "Age Group" option on the results page!
  • Scroll down to the bottom of the page, there will be a box titled "Age Group" - this describes the age of the population in the article
  • Select which age groups you'd like by clicking on the checkboxes to the left of the options you'd like

Location of Study

• Some American journals are published by UK publishers, and vice versa. The locations you see in the detail records or results lists are related to the publisher location, not where the research took place.
• You will need to look at the methods section of the research article to determine where the study took place (population studied). Another clue is to see where the researchers are from.
• DON’T use location/geographic limiters – they don’t work!​
• When in doubt - check with your professor!