Welcome to the Nursing and Allied Health Research Guide! 

Use the blue tabs to navigate the guide and find practical help for your research assignments. 

Please contact librarian Claire Dannenbaum if you need assistance.

According to the Oregon Consortium of Nursing Education:

"A competent nurse, in making practice decisions, locates, evaluates and uses the best available evidence, coupled with a deep understanding of client experience and preferences, through the understanding that...

1. There are many sources of knowledge, including research evidence, standards of care, community perspectives, practical wisdom gained from experience, which are legitimate sources of evidence for decision-making.
2. Knowledge from the biological, social, medical, public health, and nursing sciences is constantly evolving; nurses need to update their knowledge continuously, using reliable, current sources of information.
3. Nurses need to know how to learn new interventions independently, because the definition of “best practice” of interventions is continuously modified, and new interventions are constantly being developed."

Evidence-Based Practice (Evidence-Based Nursing, Evidence-Based Medicine) is:

"the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. The practice of evidence-based medicine requires the integration of individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research and our patient's unique values and circumstances."

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a project of the US Department of Health and Human Services, has developed an extensive website of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines.

The Knowledge Translation Program offers a series of clinical appraisal worksheets.

Evidence-Based Medicine includes five steps:

Step 1: Converting the need for information into an answerable question
Step 2: Finding the best evidence with which to answer that question
Step 3: Critically appraising the evidence for its validity, impact, and applicability
Step 4: Integrating the evidence with clinical expertise and the patient's unique biology, values and circumstances
Step 5: Evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of the process

More resources for steps 1 through 3 are in the tabs above. Steps 4 and 5 are up to you as a health care provider.

Strauss, S. E. (2005). Evidence-based medicine : How to practice and teach EBM (3rd ed.). New York: Elsevier/Churchill Livingstone.