The improvement of nursing students’ search skills through teaching evidence-based databases

Nurses must possess searching skills to provide high quality patient care and perform evidence-based nursing process. Therefore, the current study focused on the effect of teaching evidence-based databases on nursing studentschr('39') search skills.

This was an applied semi-experimental study in which a one group pretest–posttest design was used. In this study, postgraduate nursing students of Iran University of Medical Sciences were selected as an available sample from all postgraduate nursing students of medical universities in 2019-2020 academic year in Tehran and were instructed to search in PubMed and Embase databases. Pre-test and post-test including five clinical questions and a researcher-made questionnaire were used for data collection. The questionnaire included 11 questions, each of which assessed a skill and weighted from 0 to 2. Data were analyzed by SPSS software version 21 using descriptive and inferential statistics. (P<0.001)

The mean scores of studentschr('39') performance on keyword selection, thesaurus use, question formulation in PICO (Patient, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome), use of Boolean operators, parentheses, phrase search, synonyms, truncation, field search and search filters were significantly increased after training.

Considering the effectiveness of teaching evidence-based databases, it is necessary to incorporate targeted and long-term training into nursing curricula to create bases for performing evidence-based practice.