Nursing: Evidence-based sources

QuickSearch and Google Scholar are good for finding ebooks and chapters and journal articles.

Jessica uses a not-so-well-known resource (The TRIP database, where T.R.I.P. is Turning Research Into Practice) for finding extra high-quality material, including:

• systematics reviews (comparisons of different research studies to see if they all get the same results, or comparison of different treatments to see if one is better, with best practice recommendations or implications)
• evidence summaries (best practice recommendations, and a summary of the evidence behind them)
• reports from international sources
• more research articles

Like Google Scholar, it is very easy to search but some of the items in the results might require an institutional login to access:

The Joanna Briggs Institute COnNect+ database also has systematic reviews, evidence summaries, and best practice recommendations, but it has two advantages:

• Australian-based
• a lot of material aimed at nurses, not other health professionals

It has a very simple search engine, so do not expect sophisticated searching.

Cochrane Library contains very high-quality evidence-based double-checked systematic reviews with recommendations on whether a treatment is actually beneficial or not (whether it is better than placebo), whether all similar studies on the same treatment show the same benefits, and comparisons of one treatment versus another.

Cochrane systematic reviews (and systematic reviews in general):

• Where you find: "treatment A produced better results on 50,000 people than treatment B"
• Where you find: "treatment C was no better than placebo"
• NOT where you find: "my aunt's friend's cousin got better with treatment B, so everyone should use it"
• NOT where you find: "5 patients who used treatment B said they felt better"

Search interface:

Results:

Important sections to read: