Using Health Source

What is Health Source | Getting Started

What is Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition?

Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition is a searchable database which gives you online access to articles from more than 400 medical journals. Also featured are abstracts and indexing for over 500 journals.

Peer-reviewed articles are read and evaluated before publication by a panel of experts in the field. The journal editor then returns the comments from the experts to the author. The article is only published after all changes are made to the editor's satisfaction. This helps ensure a good-quality article.

In our case studies, Cheryl is interested in peer-reviewed articles about exercise therapy for teenagers with diabetes. Health Source is a good database for her to search because it contains a broad variety of resources, many of which are available in full-text.

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Getting Started with Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition

You can access Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition by going to the Health Sciences Library Electronic Indexes and Databases page, clicking on 'H' and scrolling down to Health Source Plus - Nursing/Academic. It is also available from the E-Research Tools page.

Health Source gives you three searching options: Basic Search, Advanced Search, and Choose Databases. We recommend using Advanced Search. (Health Source opens to Advanced Search by default.) This allows you to combine terms and to limit your search in various ways, such as selecting peer-reviewed journals.

For example, Cheryl is interested in exercise therapies for teenaders with diabetes.

Cheryl enters her search terms (diabetes and exercise) in the Find: fields, and then clicks on the Search button. A list of citations appears:

To view an article, she clicks on a link below a citation. For example, if she clicks PDF Full Text for item 3 above, the article appears in PDF format:

If no full text links are shown for a particular article that interests here, Cheryl can click on the button to find out in UNC-Chapel Hill has access to the article.

To further narrow her search, Cheryl can enter more search terms, or use more search options in the "Narrow Your Results" section of the initial search screen. For example, she could limit her search to articles published in the last few years by entering a date range in the Date Published field. She can also filter her results by choosing subject or journal title in the Narrow Results by column on the left of the search results screen.