Online Reference Sources

The Nursing Reference Center gives you fast reference information about a variety of medical conditions and diseases. It's a good place to look for good beginning information about your topic. (Look for the words Quick Lessons when searching.)

Credo is a searchable full-text source of several reference books and encyclopedias. Use this for basic, introductory information.

Finding Research ArticleS in the Databases

Remember to use the Subject Headings or MeSH headings to limit your search quickly in any of our databases.

Medline contains mostly citations and abstracts. In addition to medicine, the scope of this database includes nursing, dentistry, and veterinary science. Use the limitors on the bottom of the search page, and examine your results carefully.

PubMed is the free government database that indexes medical and biological information. It shares much of its content with Medline, and is something that you will have access to when you graduate.

CINAHL is a nursing database which indexes a lot of medical articles. It can be another good place to discover research articles.

If you see the "find full text" box, it does not mean that the article is full-text in that database. Click on the box to find out if the NPU or other Illinois libraries own the journal, or if it is full-text in another database. It will also allow you to click on interlibrary loan. Just fill in your information and we will contact you when your article arrives. (Expect this to take about 2 weeks.)