Finding original research articles related to your patient's problems can be a challenging requirement. Many students begin by looking for nursing research articles that focus upon the medical diagnosis or the etiology written in their patient's chart by a doctor. Although the medical terminology or medical diagnosis in the chart should be checked as possible subjects in ProQuest, be aware that these types of articles are a smaller percent of nursing research written.
This is not surprising. Medical research tends to be written by medical doctors and examines the nature of disease, etiology and pathology. Nursing research represents the efforts of nurses to study problems arising within the wide realms of nursing interactions and includes subjects that may be medical or psycho/social. By understanding the nature of original research and by equipping yourself with all aspects and potential considerations of your patient's history, you should be able locate research articles applicable to your case study.
One of the first difficulties you may encounter is how to identity research articles. All original research across any discipline attempts to use the principles of scientific method to investigate a problem. The steps of this process should be clearly identifiable if the article is to be accepted as research. If you would like to read an easily understandable explanation of the scientific method, the research process and a discussion of the characteristics of a research article you may refer to Notter's Essentials of Nursing Research, by Holt, Budin and Notter. See pages 28-31. It is available in the Reference Room under the Call Number RT 81.5. N67 1999.
An effective and simple way to become familiar with the appearance and elements of research articles is to examine a few issues of the journal, Nursing Research. It is available in the Periodicals Area under the Call Number RT 1 N8. Nursing Research features articles consistently containing the steps of scientific method. The steps are shown as headings in the article and are meant to organize the research process from start to finish. Some common headings used in research articles are: Background, Objective, Methods, Procedure, Statistics, Results, and Discussion.