Answered By: Vicki Sciuk
Last Updated: May 23, 2022     Views: 312

Depending on your assignment, there are some basic resources (Gale eBooks), and also more detailed resources, with articles from medical or nursing journals and health magazines, such as ProQuest or CINAHL.

  • Gale EBooks (formerly Gale Virtual Reference Library - GVRL) 
    • Excellent starting point for an overview of a disease. Useful for the assignments or discussion board questions which ask you to describe a disease, and give its causes, symptoms, prevention, treatment.
    • Contains Encyclopedias of Medicine, Surgery & Nursing.
  • CINAHL
    • A database of reliable articles from hundreds of journals covering nursing, primary care, and allied health which is often used in hospitals and nursing schools. You can restrict your results to Peer-reviewed articles; for EBP projects there are useful limits under Publication Type for just Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses.
  • ProQuest Nursing & Allied Health
    • Reliable healthcare information covering nursing, allied health, alternative and complementary medicine. Wide range of topics that include nutrition, oncology, pediatric care, pharmacology and public health. You can restrict your search to Peer-reviewed articles, which are from Scholarly Journals, by checking Peer-reviewed below the search box.
  • ProQuest Health and Medical Collection 
    • Contains clinical, surgical, biomedical, consumer health, and healthcare administration journals, most with full-text articles on different aspects of your topic. Some are quite technical (or about experiments on rats), but there are many clinical trials and results of human studies, or reviews of what has been written on a subject. You can restrict your search to Peer-reviewed articles, which are from Scholarly Journals, by checking Peer-reviewed below the search box.
  • ProQuest Ebook Central 
    • Over 150,000 online titles on many subjects available in full text, including many consumer health books and medical textbooks about diseases. Under BOOK STATUS, check the box "Owned and subscribed to by my library" to get books that are immediately available.


NOTE: All of these library databases have a Citation Tools or Cite button where you can get APA (or MLA) formatted citation for your references - just make sure you copy the correct one that your instructor wants you to use.
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TIPS for Narrowing down a topic about disease: 

Let's say you were researching "obesity". Because "obesity" is such a large topic with thousands of articles written about it over many years, you may want to narrow it down when searching in ProQuest or CINAHL. You will find articles about certain aspects, which you can use to add something specific to your paper.

Examples: obesity AND African-Americans or obesity AND "Gastric bypass surgery" or "morbid obesity" or obesity AND children. Choose whatever aspect interests you, that you would like to write all (or a section) of your paper about, then search for that.

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