Nursing, education, and other subject databases are available for students at Southern and Western. For the most part, both institutions have the same databases, however there are a few cases where Southern has something Western does not have and vice-versa. Due to the nature of licensing and secure access, students must log into their own institution’s databases. If for some reason you are having an issue with access, please contact your librarian.
For our purposes here, databases can be thought of as organized collections of documents. A database might contain articles, dissertations, reports, books, book reviews, and more. Depending on the database, articles could be from peer reviewed journals, professional or trade journals, popular magazines, newspapers, or newsletters. Databases have features and tools to help you successfully locate what you need, generally peer reviewed articles, books, or dissertations along with a PDF and citations.
In an academic database, articles are indexed in databases fields. This is similar to an index of words, subjects, or topics in the back of a book. In the book, you look up a term and it tells you which page(s) it’s on. In a database, you type in a term and the databases searches for any articles that have the term in them.
Generally, one uses search terms in database fields. By default, most databases search in a number of fields such as the Title field, Abstract field, or Author field. Depending on the database, there may be other fields such as topic, keyword, subject, and full-text. When you search, you can use the default settings or you can specify that the term(s) you want are in a specific field, such as in the article title. A simple, initial search for nursing education in CINAHL has about 142K results. Same search for the terms in the title field has about 9,500 results. Other database tools let you “filter” the results such as limiting to peer reviewed articles in certain years. There are about 2,950 peer reviewed articles published 2007-2017.
Databases may also be called article databases, index, or index/abstract databases. Examples are Academic Search Premier, JSTOR, PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, CINAHL, PubMed, Medline, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. There are many more.
Note that access to content, actual full-text of articles, etc., varies with different databases. Three main options they may have are:
- provide the actual article within the database
- link out to the article somewhere outside of the database (into another database or to a journal)
- do not provide the article, in which case one needs to use interlibrary loan (ILL)
