A Master’s prepared nurse is expected to keep up with current nursing knowledge and to contribute to the evolution of best practices in nursing.

Foundations for Graduate Study: Week 4 Post

A Master’s prepared nurse is expected to keep up with current nursing knowledge and to contribute to the evolution of best practices in nursing. Both require the nurse to perform scholarly research; to be able to identify credible sources of information in order to properly synthesize, build upon, and demonstrate an understanding of a topic to an appropriate audience. Scholarly research begins with having access to high-quality databases. In this post, I will cite an article from a database and will critique the database to denote my knowledge of how to choose a proper database for scholarly research.

The Article

The article I chose is related to my practice area of Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing. The article relays detailed information about an Australian study of how nurses determined the most prominent issues in mental health nursing. (Wynaden et.al., 2014). It was taken from the ProQuest Nursing & Allied Health Source database.

The Database

I chose the ProQuestNursing & Allied Health Source database because it contains the unique inclusion of “grey literature”. Grey literature is literature that is not peer-reviewed and therefore requires more scrutiny to validate it as a credible source of information. Grey literature can be valuable as a tool for inciting new ideas on a subject and to give the reader more content to explore in order to gain a more critical understanding of a given topic.

 

 

 

The Advantages

In addition to including grey literature, ProQuest Nursing & Allied Health Source has multiple search filters, allowing the end user to narrow their search by age groups, languages, document type, and source type. The interface is user-friendly and intuitive.

The Problem

Despite the many search filters it has, ProQuest Nursing & Allied Health Source could use a search filter that sorts out where the studies took place. I wanted to find studies that had taken place only within the United States and while I was able to find some of them by typing “United States” in the keyword box, it would have been easier to access more of them with a geographic filter.

Conclusion

While grey literature can be seen as distracting, non-essential information when conducting scholarly research, I feel it has value as a tool for researchers to explore various views about any given topic, allowing them to form more thought-provoking questions to use in their analysis of peer-reviewed literature. ProQuest Nursing & Allied Health Source’s database stands apart from other databases as it includes grey literature. This unique feature is the sole reason why I recommend this resource over others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

Wynaden, D., Heslop, K., Al Omari, O., Nelson, D., Osmond, B., Taylor, M., & Gee, T. (2014). Identifying mental health nursing research priorities: A delphi study.Contemporary Nurse : A Journal for the Australian Nursing Profession, 47(1), 16-26. Retrieved from https://ezp.waldenulibrary.org/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/docview/1556061983?accountid=14872

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