PsycINFO, produced by the American Psychological Association, is a collection of electronically stored bibliographic references--most with abstracts or content summaries. It contains citations that PsycINFO has created in electronic form. Although the references themselves are all written in English, the covered literature includes material published in over 45 countries and written in 30 languages.Coverage: 1872-present
PsycTESTS is a research database that provides access to psychological tests¸ measures¸ scales and other assessments as well as descriptive and administrative information
Web of Science is a multidisciplinary database with searchable author abstracts¸ covering the journal literature of the sciences. It indexes 5¸300 major journals across 164 scientific disciplines¸ covering approximately 2¸000 more journals than its SCI print and CD-ROM counterparts¸ with all cited references captured. Coverage: 1965 - present
Locating Primary Research Articles—see evidence based hierarchy pyramid to clarify.
A primary source in science is a document or record that reports on a study, experiment, trial or research project. Primary sources are usually written by the person(s) who conducted the research, study, or experiment. They include hypothesis, methodology, and results sections.
Primary Sources include:
Pilot/prospective studies
Cohort studies
Survey research
Case studies
Lab notebooks
Clinical trials and randomized clinical trials/RCTs
Dissertations
Essentially, for clinical journal articles, primary sources will be reporting original research – which means a primary source journal article would not be a systematic review, meta-analysis, letter to the editor, etc. Please refer to the Evidence Based Hierarchy Pyramid for clarification (see bottom three levels titled "unfiltered information"):
The evidence based medicine pyramid
There is not necessarily a straight-forward way as part of the database search to limit or filter to primary sources. Within CINAHL or other EBSCOhost resources, you could look in the Detailed Record for “research” articles. You will still have to use your judgment and read the full text article to determine whether it’s a primary source or not.
You can also apply a “Research” limit from the CINAHL Advanced search screen.
Primary sources for nursing theory are documents written by the theorist. Secondary sources are those written by someone else about the theory.
Examples of primary sources include:
There are several ways to find this information.
1. To find a book authored by the theorist-->from our nursing guide, click on RESOURCES--> E-books
Enter title in search box or click on MORE SEARCH OPTIONS underneath to get to the advanced search screen:
Enter theorist's name, last name, first name and select the "author" drop down to the left. Don't forget to click SEARCH in lower left corner (not visible on screenshot).
You can replicate this search strategy in all the databases. Search the theorist's name as an author to find primary source material by the chosen theorist.
Secondary sources list, summarize, compare, and evaluate primary information and studies so as to draw conclusions on or present current state of knowledge in a discipline or subject. Sources may include a bibliography which may direct you back to the primary research reported in the article.
Secondary Sources include:
