Welcome to your library subject page. This has been compiled by your subject librarian and is here to help you find information for your studies and research. It is not an exhaustive list of everything available, but will point you in the right direction.
Check out the Library Services page for opening hours and information about all our services and resources. The Distance Learners page provides information on accessing resources whilst away from campus and below you will find pointers on the most useful information sources for your studies.
OneSearch is a good place to start your research. However as you progress through your course you will need to develop your searching skills to incorporate other sources.
Watch the tutorial below for an introduction to searching or access our Finding Information page for more advice.
Click on the image above or use this link to view the tutorial: How to search tutorial
You can also sign up to our webinar for guidance on how you can develop your search skills.
See OneList (online reading lists) for current lists of recommended reading for your modules these are also linked from your Blackboard site. Remember the reading list is only the starting point, use OneSearch to find additional books and articles or browse the shelves.
We buy a lot of your books as ebooks to provide online access from any location. Find out more on the ebook page and download our EbooksGuide.
For more information on using the library check out the library pages
A Postal loans service is currently available for all students for a small registration fee of £25 for a calendar year.
To find out how to use the service, see our Postal Loans page.
We have selected some key eresources and individual journal titles to help you locate relevant material for your subject.
Use our eresources to search for relevant journal articles or other resources such as anatomy images. Although OneSearch does search many of these, using the subject specific collections will produce more tailored results and provide more relevant filters. Eresources for health is an online tutorial to help you use these resources.
In addition to these key full-text eresources you can also explore our full A-Z of eresources to see the whole list and see the Research pages for additional research specific resources.
| Eresource | Description | |
|---|---|---|
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Anatomy TV | An Interactive 3D anatomy resource. Rotate the body, navigate through the layers and click on the image to bring up the relevant text. |
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Diagrams, videos, podcasts and revision questions to help you get to grips with anatomy. | |
| Nursing and health specific | ||
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CINAHL |
The key collection for Nursing and Allied health. It indexes (citations only) over 4000 journals and holds the full-text of 760 journals, plus linking to our other subscribed content. You will get fewer results but they should be more relevant. |
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MEDLINE | MEDLINE is the U.S. National Library of Medicine journal citation database covering medicine, nursing, the health care system and much more. This version includes citations from 5,200 scholarly journals and full-text from more than 1,450. It forms part of PubMed which searches wider but doesn't provide full-text. |
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Proquest Nursing and Allied Health | One of several collections from Proquest, all of which together form Proquest Central. This particular collection indexes 850 journals and holds the full-text of 715 Nursing and Allied health titles. More information in Getting started with Proquest databases. |
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Provides systematic reviews of clinical based research on the effectiveness of specific interventions. It will depend on your topic as to whether there will be a relevant review but if there is, it will be a key resource. Cochrane also runs a blog Evidence for everyday nursing, which pulls together reviews into a more digestible format. | |
| Wider and multi-disciplinary | ||
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ScienceDirect. | Covers physical sciences and engineering, life sciences, health sciences and social sciences. As the name suggests it is more science based so it will depend on your topic whether you use this one. |
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PsycARTICLES | Full-text articles from 59 Psychology journals. |
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Community care inform | Aimed at professionals who work with children and with adults in health and social care. Community Care Inform pulls together policy, guides, research, case law and legislation on a wide range of topics, from adoption to mental health and welfare rights. You will need to use the Shibboleth login on and off campus to get access to the full-text. Two collections are now available Adults and Children |
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Academic Search Complete | A huge multi-disciplinary database which indexes (citations only) over 9,500 journals and provides full-text to over 6,500. Good for a search on more general topics. |
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Proquest Central | Pulls together many of the Proquest collections, searching thousands of journals across many subjects. More information in Getting started with Proquest databases. |
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Sage Journals | Whereas the collections above hold content from a number of publishers this collection holds 900 full-text peer reviewed journals published by Sage. Other publisher collections are available but this one has the most relevant full-text journals. |
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Dissertations and theses | Global collection with some full-text from 1997 onwards. It is possible to limit by level e.g. MSc. To access UoC undergrad dissertations go to Collections in OneSearch |
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Refworks |
Refworks is used to collect and manage your sources. It will also create your Reference list (Bibliography) in the Referencing style of your choice. Download the guide to using Proquest Refworks
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Most of the time you will search for articles using OneSearch or the databases above but you can also browse or search inside key journal titles. There are too many to mention but two of the key Nursing publishers are listed below. All of these journals are Peer reviewed and a good starting point. For a full range of titles check our A-Z of journals via Journals Search.
| Journal | Description | |
|---|---|---|
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British Journal of Nursing | Published roughly twice a month this journal keeps you up to date with the latest developments in clinical and practice-based nursing. |
| Nursing Standard | Weekly journal from the RCN keeping you up to date with current issues across all fields. A Professional journal that does include some peer reviewed clinical articles. | |
| British Journal of Community Nursing | Published monthly this is a key journal for Primary care, providing clinical reviews and updates, innovations in practice and research articles. |
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| Nursing Times | Published monthly the Nursing Times is a professional journal keeping you upto date with current issues in the workplace but it also includes peer reviewed clinical articles, suitable for assignments. Our access is through Ovid so you will need to use Ovid via OneSearch to access articles, NOT the Nursing Times website. | |
| Publisher Journal collection | Description | |
|---|---|---|
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Access to RCNi Journals is now provided as part of Cinahl.
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You can search individual journals using the links below Nursing Standard, Emergency Nurse, Learning Disability Practice, Mental Health Practice, Nurse Researcher, Nursing Children and Young People, Nursing Management, Nursing Older People, Primary Health Care. |
| Mark Allen Publishing - MAG Online |
We don't subscribe to all of their journals and older content (pre 2016) will need to be accessed via the links below. British Journal of Healthcare Assistants, British Journal of Mental Health Nursing, International Journal of Palliative Nursing, Journal of Prescribing Practice, Journal of Wound Care, Practice Nursing. |
Most hospitals will have a Library or Education centre. You are entitled to join as either a student on placement there or as a member of staff (includes bank staff). This will give you access to their print books and you can also request an Open Athens account. If you are on placement at the hospital you may be offered an introductory session by the library (Education centre). We recommend that you attend so that you can take full benefit of the additional resources that the NHS provides. If this doesn't happen, visit the library and ask to be signed up. You can find a list of NHS libraries here.
Similar to OneSearch this hub searches the NHS core collection of library resources and also gives quick access to NICE guidelines and BMJ best practice. It provides access to some collections that the University does not subscribe to, such as the British Nursing Index and Embase, as well as some we do, such as CINAHL. These are the resources that you will have access to in your professional career so it is a good idea to get familiar with them now.
You will need an OpenAthens account to view the full-text, search individual collections or access full-text. This is different to the University which uses something called Shibboleth or Institutional access.
Full details on the NHS hub and how to get an OpenAthens password.
A suite of online tutorials provided by Health Education England, supporting every aspect of healthcare. You can access most modules with a free registration but for them to count towards your CPD you need to log in with Open Athens.
See the guide on how to set up a free account e-LfH account creation.
Two new courses from the e-LfH - Literature searching and Critical Appraisal
| Organisations | ||
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Department of Health and Social Care | The Government Department website. Access Guidance, Policy papers and statistics |
| Royal College of Nursing (RCN) | The UKs largest union and professional nursing body. If you are member you will be able to access the British Nursing Index (BNI Plus), a database indexing over 220 core nursing journals. | |
| The regulatory body for Nursing. Standards and guidance including the new Standards of Proficiency (2019) | ||
| NICE provides guidance and advice on health and social care. Use the site to access Clinical Knowledge Summaries, guidance, standards and the BNF | ||
| Independent health think tank providing research and policy analysis. | ||
| King's Fund | Independent charity seeking to improve the health and system in England | |
| World Health organisation (WHO) | The coordinating authority on international health within the United Nations. Use for Global Data and factsheets | |
| Evidence-based information | ||
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| Provides resources and background information for healthcare professionals, with Critical Appraisal tools and educational material to download. | ||
| Helps you to find and interpret the best available evidence from health research by providing some useful checklists. | ||
| Appraises research to identify the most reliable, relevant and significant findings to support the NHS. It disseminates these findings as Signals (The latest important research, summarised), Highlights (Conditions, treatments and issues explored using NIHR evidence) and Themed reviews. | ||
| A search tool designed to allow health professionals to rapidly identify the highest quality clinical evidence for clinical practice. | ||
| Online course from the NHS e-Library for Health. Designed to enable the healthcare workforce (clinical and non-clinical) to build confidence in the critical appraisal process when applying and evaluating research. | ||
| Critically appraising for Anti-racism | Race, which is social construct is often confused with genetic ancestry in published literature about health. Ramona challenges this and the fact that ethnic minorities are under represented in health research. She has created a Tool to help you identify this bias. | |
| Health data and statistics | ||
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Office for National Statistics | Government statistics and reports including Heath and Social Care the census |
| Still relevant for pre-2021 statistics but replaced by | ||
| Centralised collection of social research data for the UK including Access to key surveys such as the Health Survey England and the Continuous Household survey | ||
| Statistical information reports from Cancer Research | ||
| Statistics on risk factors for heart disease, from the British heart Foundation. | ||
| Contains Local Ward and Parish data. | ||
| Local data. Brings together analysis and research about the people of cumbria. | ||
| WHO site pulling together global health data. | ||
| USA health statistics | ||
| Other useful sites | ||
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NHS Acronym buster | |
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Looks at the importance of providing understandable health information, both written and spoken. |
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| Health talk online | People talk about their experiences of health and illness | |
| Grey Literature covers all types of government and organisational documents: conference papers, policy documents, patient leaflets, blogs and more. The definition is that it isn't peer reviewed and is published by an organisation/body whose primary objective isn’t making money from publishing. Now that much more is held digitally and archived it is getting easier to find but can still be tricky. | ||
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Covid resources |
The UK Health Security Agency (previously Public Health England) have created an information page for Covid 19 https://phelibrary.koha-ptfs.co.uk/coronavirusinformation/ e-Learning for Healthcare have created an online training resources for NHS and social care staff https://www.e-lfh.org.uk/programmes/coronavirus/ |
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| Help and Advice | Link | |
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If you are experiencing any problems accessing eresources, check our troubleshooting guide for advice. |
Accessing Online Resources |
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If you are experiencing problems logging into a resource, try resetting your university password using the MFA Password Reset Tool. If the problem persists, please contact the IT Service Desk (itservicedesk@cumbria.ac.uk). |
MFA Password Reset |
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The Student Enquiry Point is a new, simpler way to contact Student Services. Using the Student Enquiry Point tile on the Student Hub you can submit an enquiry relating to the wide range of services provided by Student Services. | Student Hub |
