In nursing and other health-care fields, care decisions should be based on evidence, which seems obvious. In actuality, throughout the history of medicine, care decisions were often based on tradition, or "expert" opinion.
As you search for sources to support your assignments, you should be locating and citing strong, evidence-based sources. Websites, blogs, and consumer health magazines are not good sources for your purpose.
Learn more about peer-review in scholarly research by watching this short video from NC State.
While searching article databases like CINAHL Complete and Proquest Nursing & Allied Health Source, you will likely find a mixture of scholarly peer-reviewed research articles, and articles published in other types of periodicals.
While scholarly articles like original research, systematic reviews, meta-analyses, clinical trials, etc. are considered the most evidence-based, these other types of articles can be useful in some cases.
Trade or Professional Periodicals are publications that are written for and subscribed to by people in a specific field, industry, trade, or profession. Examples in nursing include:
Articles in these publications focus on sharing the latest news of the profession, book reviews, current trends, ads for professional products, continuing education, political advocacy, and other items of interest to nurses. They tend to be laid out in a more visually attractive manner than scholarly articles, and while they use professional jargon, tend to be more conversational (less formal) in tone.
For more information on identifying and determining the pros and cons of different types of sources, see our "Evaluating Sources" guide, or the short video, below, on "Scholarly, Trade & Popular Publications."
1) Look at the database's description of the article: You can often get a clue as to the type of article you are looking at based on the database's detailed description of it. Look for terms like "research" and "peer-reviewed." Examples:
2) Look at the abstract: Another clue can be to look at the abstract. Is it describing original research methods, results, and implications?
Or, is it not?
3) Read the article: Does it have the typical content and structure of a scholarly journal article, with an Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion (and/or Conclusion), and References/Works Cited? (peer-reviewed articles may have different headings than these, depending on whether they are quantitative research, qualitative research, case studies, systematic reviews, etc., but should at least have the abstract and references/works cited)
Or, is it laid out to look more like a magazine article (pictures, conversational tone, attractive fonts, etc.)
