Nursing and Allied Health: Citations and Journal Access Introduction

Techniques to locate and access articles vary depending upon the research situation. Journal articles can be accessed via print copies found in the physical library, electronically via our library databases, and via Interlibrary Loan - usually electronic copies that other libraries send to us in the event we do not offer the full-text ourselves.

The way you search for and access the articles varies, depending upon what you are looking for:

If you simply require nursing journal articles on your particular topic, use one of our nursing subject databases, for example CINAHL.

Subject databases have two primary functions: 

1. They index journals - meaning provide basic information about articles that have been published by journals. At minimum this includes the sort of information found in citations, but sometimes includes short descriptions or abstracts of the article content, and lists of subject headings that relate to the articles.  The origins of the name CINAHL relates to its original name: Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature, which describes this function very well.
    
2. Many databases also provide the full-text of many of the articles, in basic html format (plain text) or pdfs (think of them as scans of the journal pages - including all the images, charts, etc.). Essentially, the publisher of the journal licenses the full-text content to the database company for a fee and when the library purchases access to the database our students receive access to the article content.
    

If you know the exact article you need, for example the article cited in the "Interpreting Citations" box, you have a few options as JCC students:

• A good option for this article is to search in a nursing subject database, for example CINAHL. For our example of Nursing article, CINAHL does provide indexing for Nursing and includes the basic information for the article, but it does not provide the electronic full-text. It is up to you to locate that. (The JCC Library offers Nursing in print format.)
   
• Use our Primo search tool to see if the article full text is available or if it is indexed in one of our databases. Enclose the exact article title in quotation marks and "Search Everything."  Primo is like a search engine for our databases and while helpful, at times it does not provide accurate results for specific articles and that is the case for this example, if you try a search for the article mentioned, it is not returned. However, keep Primo in mind as you do your research, searching all of our databases at once is useful at times and many times searching for specific articles does work!
   
• If you have the doi number for the article, as we do for the example article, you can resolve the doi and receive links that will take you to the publisher or journal home page on the Internet. This is worth trying because some journal articles are available for free via these links. However, many are not and in those cases you will likely have the option to purchase or rent the article directly from the publisher. Don't do this! Usually the Library can provide you with the article free of charge, via a database or via Interlibrary Loan where we can obtain the article from another library for you.

Professionals in most career paths are expected to be versed in the literature of their field. Understanding citations allows the reader to know what has been cited and in turn gives clues as to how to locate the source themselves. As a student, you will be creating citations in your own research projects as well.

Here is a typical APA citation for an article nursing students may encounter:

Chaney, A. (2019). Caring for patients with chronic hepatitis
          C infection. Nursing, 49(3), 36–44.
          https://doi.org/10.1097/01.NURSE.0000553271.39804.a4

The title of the article is "Caring for patients with chronic hepatitis C infection."  It was written by A. Chaney and was published in 2019, in the journal Nursing.  The number 49 indicates that as of 2019, Nursing had 49 volumes, or years of publication. The article was included in the third issue on pages 36 - 44.

The url provided is actually the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) of the article.  According to doi.org:  "Clicking on a DOI link takes you to one or more current URLs or other services related to a single resource. If the URLs or services change over time, e.g., the resource moves, this same DOI will continue to resolve to the correct resources or services at their new locations."