Subject guide: Nursing

Here we have listed databases, guides and links useful for students of the Master’s Programme in Global Sexual and Reproductive Health and nursing programmes. Some of the resources listed are freely available, others are licenced and can only be used by Dalarna University students and staff.

Academic articles
  • Pubmed contains material in medicin, care, nursing care, odontology, veterinary medicin, biomedicine and much more.
  • CINAHL is a database for subject areas like care, nursing care, physiotherapy, rehabliation and much more.
  • PsycINFO is a database with resources in psychology, behaviour and other subject nearby.
  • Scopus is an interdisciplinary database with scientific literature in various subject areas. It also a database for citation searches.
  • This database is designed to meet the information needs of the caring professions, and spans the literature of health, social services, psychology, sociology, economics, politics, race relations and education. The database abstracts and indexes over 500 journals, from more than 16 countries.
  • Interdisciplinary database with references from scienctific journals, books, reports and conferences in various subjects. It also a database for citation searches.
  • Google Scholar is Googles interface for scientific material. Here you can find articles, thesis and books from academic publisher and universities from all over the world. The Universities resources in fulltext from different vendors and subscribers are integrated in Google Scholar but you need to go through the library webpage.
  • The Cochrane Library consists of a regularly updated collection of evidence-based medicine databases, including The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.
  • Cabells Predatory Reports is a searchable database of ”predatory journals”.
  • Ulrichsweb offers detailed information from more than 300,000 journals. For example you can find out if a journal contains peer reviewed articles.
Other resources

Subject terms

When you are searching for literature on a specific subject you need to find good search terms.  Databases often have a list of predetermined terms - a so called subject heading list (sometimes called controlled vocabulary or thesaurus) - that you can use. 

Subject terms are used to tag or label all articles about a specific topic. If there is a subject term matching the content of the article it will be tagged with it, even if the author/s have used other synonymous or related terms in the article. By searching with a subject term, you will find all articles tagged with that specific term and you won’t risk missing relevant material.

The subject heading lists are often organized in a hierarchical structure where a superior term has a broader meaning, and a subordinate term has a narrower meaning. Test to move upwards or downwards in the hierarchy to find those terms that suit your search best. 

Every database has its own subject heading list, and they are often named differently:

In PubMed, the list is called MeSH (Medical Subject Headings 
In CINAHL, the list is called CINAHL Headings 
In PsycINFO, the list is called Thesaurus 

MeSH Browser NLM 
Search for subject terms/MeSH in National Library of Medicine MeSH database. 

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