SU Library: NURS 660: Planning for Evidence-Based Practice: Understanding Evidence-Based Practice

Welcome!

This guide will help you understand, find, evaluate, and annotate evidence-based practice resources. If you'd like more help as you're doing research for this course, contact your librarian for the School of Nursing and Health Professions:

Elizabeth Fields

she/her

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Owings Mills North Campus
Philip A. Zaffere Library (PAZ) 172

443-394-9941

Subjects: Biology, Biomedical Engineering, Biotechnology, Chemistry, Environmental Science, Forensic Science, Healthcare Management, Mathematics, Medical Laboratory Science, Nursing, Physics, Statistical Sources, Stevenson Online

Understanding Evidence-Based Practice

Evidence-based practice (EBP), also called, evidence-based medicine (EBM), is:

[T]he conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients.

Sackett, D. L., Rosenberg, W. M. C., Muir Gray, J. A., Haynes, R., & Richardson, W. S. (1996). Evidence based medicine: What it is and what it isn’t. BMJ, 312(7023): 71. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.312.7023.71

Types of EBP Resources

EBP requires that we use reputable, high-quality information from a variety of sources before making decisions about how to practice medicine or provide care. Some of this should sound familiar to you because most of your projects have required that you use and cite accurate, peer-reviewed scholarly articles. EBP resources, however, are a special subset of resources. An article published in a journal is not necessarily EBP just because it's been through the peer-review process.

When we talk about EBP resources, we separate them into two categories, unfiltered and filtered. Some examples are:

EBM Pyramid and EBM Page Generator. (c) Copyright 2006-2014. Trustees of Dartmouth College and Yale University. All Rights Reserved.
Produced by Jan Glover, David Izzo, Karen Odato and Lei Wang.

Filtered Resources

Filtered resources are considered the highest quality of EBP information. These resources appraise the quality of studies and often make recommendations for practice.

Filtered information is available via the following Library databases:

CINAHL Plus with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Comprehensive database in the fields of nursing and allied health, containing research, EBP, and other professional publications
PubMed This link opens in a new window
Extensive database that includes research in the sciences, medicine, biomedicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, life sciences, and more. Some content is available in full-text; other articles may be available from publisher web sites.
Medline with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Full-text scholarly journal articles in the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary science, and more

You can also find filtered information in the following databases and websites. The Library doesn't subscribe to them, but you may be familiar with them through your job or another institution:

The Cochrane Library and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews
DynaMed
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Unfiltered Resources

Evidence is not always available via filtered resources. Searching for primary literature or original research studies may be required.

Unfiltered information is available via the following Library databases:

PubMed This link opens in a new window
To limit your PubMed search to the best evidence-producing studies: Click on "clinical queries" (on the left side of the screen). This specialized search is intended for clinicians and has built-in search "filters." Four study categories--therapy, diagnosis, etiology, prognosis--are provided, and you may indicate whether you wish your search to be more sensitive (i.e., include most relevant articles but probably including some less relevant ones) or more specific (i.e., including mostly relevant articles but probably omit a few)
APA PsycINFO This link opens in a new window
International coverage of the professional and academic literature in psychology, medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, linguistics, and other areas.
To limit your PsycINFO search to the best evidence-producing studies: Click on the "Limits" icon to use "Clinical Queries" or limit to "methodology" types.
Indexing to dissertations, book chapters, technical reports and other documents.
CINAHL Plus with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature
To limit your CINAHL search to the best evidence-producing studies: Click on the "Limits" icon to use "Clinical Queries" or limit to "Research" or other "publication" types (i.e., systematic review).

Background Information/Expert Opinion

Note: Evidence in these resources may vary from expert opinion to high levels of evidence. However, sometimes you'll need this information as a starting point for current practices or understanding of a subject.

R2 Online Library (Nursing) This link opens in a new window
Full-text nursing textbooks and ebooks. Only one user allowed at a time for each title
The R2 Online subscription allows only one user at a time. If you are unable to access the R2 Online databases, please try again later.
ProQuest Ebook Central (formerly ebrary) This link opens in a new window
Full-text electronic books
Description: Contains more than 137,000 titles, the majority of which were published after 2004. Users can read and highlight parts of texts; and at the same time, can take notes. All of the information can be saved into a personal account to be used for later use.

Need help?

Directions on how to download a book for offline reading.

For More Information

For additional resources in understanding EBP, view these websites and tutorials:

Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine - University of Oxford The Centre promotes evidence-based health care and provide support and resources to anyone who wants to make use of them. Includes the EBM Toolbox, an assortment of materials which are very useful for practitioners of EBM, and EBM Teaching Materials, including PowerPoint presentations.
Evidence Based Medicine Toolkit This is a collection of tools for identifying, assessing and applying relevant evidence for better health care decision-making. The appraisal tools are adapted from the Users' Guides series prepared by the Evidence Based Medicine Working Group and originally published in JAMA.
An Introduction to Evidence-Based Practice This self-paced, interactive tutorial will take you through the complete EBP process, emphasizing the elements of a well-built clinical question and the key issues that help determine the validity of evidence. This program was developed by the Medical Center Library at Duke University and the Health Sciences Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Evidence-Based Medicine Course Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) can be defined as the integration of individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research (Richard Sinert, unpublished lecture). The fear on the part of many clinicians that their judgment is nullified by "practicing medicine by Medline search" is reduced by the fact that clinical expertise still plays a large part in any decision made on treatment, diagnosis, screening, etc. The fear on the part of many patients that clinicians are just making a guess and hoping for the best is nullified by reliance on strictly codified criteria of what constitutes good evidence and how to find it.

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NURS 660: Planning for Evidence-Based Practice: Understanding Evidence-Based Practice