All guides: Nursing and Health: Key resources

Recommended databases

Databases are collections of resources, primarily journal articles, but they can also contain conference papers, videos, e-books, reports, images and more.

Many databases specialise in a specific subject area. You will find relevant research and academic, peer-reviewed sources for nursing and health in the databases below:

Search tips

Login to LibrarySearch or one of the databases below, then search using the main keywords that describe your topic. You can refine your search results to peer-reviewed journals, books, online books, book chapters or videos.

The following tips will also work in Google Scholar and most databases.

Use OR between words to find any of your keywords.
Group OR words using brackets.
Find "exact phrases" with quotation marks.
Add an asterisk to part of a word to find different endings and plurals.
There is a default AND relationship between terms separated by a space.

Example searches:

COVID* OR corona* OR SARS-CoV-2
"secondary bacterial pneumonia"
(COVID* OR corona* OR SARS-CoV-2) "secondary bacterial pneumonia"

ClinicalKey Student Nursing
ClinicalKey Student Nursing is a clinical search engine supporting clinical decisions. Use it to easily find and apply relevant knowledge including evidence-based monographs, books, journals and practice guidelines. In addition to the most trusted international nursing content, the database includes the Australian Medicine Handbook drug monographs, local Australian books, journals and practice guidelines.

CINAHL Complete with Full Text (EBSCO)
CINAHL Complete provides full-text access to more than 1,400 journals indexed in CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature). It contains predominantly English-language journal articles about nursing, allied health, biomedicine and healthcare. CINAHL uses the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) developed by the US National Library of Medicine.

[Video] CINAHL: Basic searching (3:20)

[Video] CINAHL: Advanced searching (3:53)

PubMed
PubMed is a free resource supporting the search and retrieval of biomedical and life sciences literature with the aim of improving health – both globally and personally. The PubMed database contains more than 37 million citations and abstracts of biomedical literature. It does not include full text journal articles; however, links to the full text are often present when available from other sources, such as the publisher's website or PubMed Central (PMC). Available to the public online since 1996, PubMed was developed and is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), located at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

PubMed User Guide

Using PubMed in Evidence-Based Practice: Training Course

[Video] What is in PubMed? (5:55)

[Video] PubMed: Find articles on a topic (0:41)

[Video] PubMed: Using the Advanced Search Builder (3:17)

[Video] PubMed: Subject Search: How it Works (4:04)

[Video] PubMed: Find Articles from a Citation (1:12)

[Video] PubMed: Find Articles by Author (2:33)

Anatomy and physiology

For resources on anatomy and physiology, including recommended databases, please see the following library subject guide:

Anatomy and Physiology

Quick Links

Learning Lab: Resources for nursing students

Resources for nursing has online tutorials for:

nursing calculations
APA referencing
critical incident reports
case study reports

Further Support

Study Support

You can get drop-in help from academic skills advisors and librarians in the Study Support Hubs, both on-campus and online, or submit a question or assignment for feedback.

Connect with a peer mentor to help you with your course. Discover a range of tools to support your study.

Your feedback and suggestions

Send us your feedback about this guide.

Library subject guides

Nursing and Health

Need help? Ask the Library!