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Developing Research Skills for Staff (HWLS): Home

Welcome to Developing your Research Skills for Literature Searching

It's really important in fields of Nursing, Midwifery, Health and Social Care to find good quality, up to date literature and evidence! As it's so important to find the best evidence and literature for your topic, you will need to develop good research skills to enable you to do this.

You have probably used Library Search to find resources, and using databases is very similar. However, databases have a wider range of functions that you can use to help you find the most appropriate literature. Databases allow you to use more complex search strategies and techniques, and this guide is going to help you to develop those skills.

About this guide: The guide is divided into the key parts of doing good quality research. Each tab covers an element of the process and is closely aligned with the literature search process. At the top of each section is a description of what you will learn in that tab. It's better if you can work through it logically, but you can drop in and out of whatever you need, when you need it!

Your Subject Guide

You can find more information related to finding literature and evidence for your chosen professional area in your dedicated subject guides. These guides are created and maintained by your Subject Librarian from their specialist knowledge of your subject areas. We have divided them into three specialist areas: Nursing & Midwifery, Allied Health, and Social Work and Social Care.

The guides contain lots of specialist information for your profession, such as professional information, unique resources to each area and links to other specialist databases that may be of use in the next level of your studies.

You can find the links to your dedicated Subject Guide here:

(We're Librarians so they are in alphabetical order reflecting no preference for specific subjects!).

Reading List for Evidence & Enquiry for Practice

This reading list is for a specific module, but some of the resources on here might be useful. This list is all about research methodology. So when you have identified your papers, you can read about the methodology you have selected! We've also digitised a key chapter on 'recruitment and data selection', which you can find at the top of the list. Here's the link:

https://rl.talis.com/3/shu/lists/5024C750-86C4-DFA2-0475-D28E44E77822.html?lang=en

 

 

Where Can I Get Help?

You can get help from your Subject Librarian. Details of who supports your area are here: https://libguides.shu.ac.uk/staff/subjectcontacts

Here are some useful help links: