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NURS 520: Quantitative Methods in Nursing Research

This guide contains instructions, search tips and tutorials to guide your study of quantitative research.

Finding Articles, Books, and More via OneSearch

OneSearch is a library search tool that looks in several (although not all) of our library databases, as well as our catalog.  OneSearch is multidisciplinary, meaning that if you search there, you will usually find many results from different fields and disciplines, including quantitative nursing research:

Using Databases to Find Nursing Research

OneSearch is a good tool for getting a general sense of what's been published on a particular topic.  However, students in graduate-level courses usually prefer to search for information in a one or more individual databases.  It may sound counterintuitive, but it can actually be easier to search one subject-specific database at a time because you know you'll get research that's related to your program or discipline.

Databases like the ones below contain both primary and secondary research. Primary research articles, what should form the bulk of your literature review, should have these parts: introduction, hypothesis, literature review, research design, methodology, results and findings, conclusion. Quantitative articles are recognized by statistical analyses of results.  

 Using the keywords you've identified from your topic sentence, search for articles in several databases. Databases will have different interfaces, different vocabulary, different content. They do have many things in common, too. They usually have a way to save articles (very useful for subsequent visits), refine searches, conduct subject searching and limit to full text.

Learn advanced search techniques like Boolean searching and truncation by watching the video below.