Q. I need to find research articles written by a nurse.

CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature) can help. It has limits for Research articles. It also has limits for "author is a nurse". This limit was just added in the summer of 2010 so can only be used for more recent articles. If you use this limit and do not find an article you can use, you can try alternative methods.

How to Use Limits to Find Research Articles by a Nurse:

1. Connect to CINAHL from the Library's home page.
2. Perform the search on your topic. Enter your search terms one concept at a time, then combine.
3. Go to the "Refine your results". This appears next to your search results on the left side of the screen.
4. Click the "Show More" link to reveal all available limits (located under the publication date limits).
5. Click a check mark next to English, Research, and "Any Author is a Nurse". If age is important to your question, use the age group box to select the age range that you need.
6. Click the Search button.

If the "Any Author is a Nurse" limit does not work for you, you have to look at the full-text of articles to determine if the author is a nurse. This is usually in the first page of the article, and may be noted by degrees after the name or in an "about the authors" section. Some journals do not provide this information at all. You can try the following limits to increase the likelihood that an author is a nurse.

1. Connect to CINAHL from the Library's home page.
2. Perform the search on your topic. Enter your search terms one concept at a time, then combine.
3. Go to the "Refine your results". This appears next to your search results on the left side of the screen.
4. Click the "Show More" link to reveal all available limits (located under the publication date limits).
5. Click a check mark next to English, Research, and select "Nursing" from the Journal Subset scroll box.
6. Click the search button.
7. Again, you have to read the full-text to determine if the author is a nurse.

For help with searching CINAHL, see our Guides and Tutorials page. It will have a link to the CINAHL handout and to videos about searching.