Nursing - Indianapolis

At times it is necessary to find articles which are authored by nurses. There are two databases with specific methods of finding those articles, CINAHL and PubMed:

CINAHL has options to limit to articles authored by a nurse. This limit was added in 2010, so you'll only be able to use this filter for articles published since 2010.  

To activate the limiter:

1. Connect to the CINAHL database
2. From the (default) Advanced Search interface, scroll down the page and choose either the First Author is Nurse or Any Author is Nurse limit option.  
3. Choose any other limits you wish to apply... i.e. Publication Date, Full-Text, or Evidence-Based Practice. 
4. Click Search.
5. Your search will automatically be updated with your chosen limits applied.

If the "Any Author is a Nurse" limit does not work for you, you will need to look at the full-text of articles to determine if the author is a nurse. This is usually on the first page of the article and may be noted by degrees (CRNA, MSN, RN etc...) after the name or in an "about the authors" section. Some journals do not provide this information at all. 

PubMed does not have a limiter for articles authored by a nurse. However, you can construct a search for nurse authors.

1. Connect to PubMed
2. In the search box type (copy and paste) the following exactly:

"RN"[ad] OR "CRNA"[ad] OR "MSN"[ad] OR "APRN"[ad] OR "CNS"[ad] OR "DNP"[ad] OR "NP"[ad] OR "nursing"[ad] AND [your search term]

3. Replace [your search term] with your search term
4. Click Search.

Example: if you wanted to search PubMed for nurse-authored articles on Patient Falls your search would look like this: 

"RN"[ad] OR "CRNA"[ad] OR "MSN"[ad] OR "APRN"[ad] OR "CNS"[ad] OR "DNP"[ad] OR "NP"[ad] OR "nursing"[ad] AND Patient Falls

This will search the Author Description field and any author that includes RN in their credentials will show up. It is up to you as the researcher to be sure that the authors are indeed nurses while searching in PubMed.

Please Note: There are not necessarily articles published/written by a nurse on your topic! If you follow the directions on this page, it is possible your search will result in zero results. You may have to broaden your search, choose another aspect of your topic, or ultimately change your topic altogether.