LibGuides: Physical Therapy: Search for Evidence

Try these First

CINAHL Plus with Full Text
This database provides a detailed index and full text of scholarly articles in nursing and allied health literature, including biomedicine and consumer health, scholarly journals, evidence-based practice guidelines, and other publications. Additional materials include full-text evidence-based care sheets, quick lessons, health care books, nursing dissertations, selected conference proceedings, and continuing education modules.
PubMed
A service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, PubMed includes over 17 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to the 1950s. PubMed includes links to full text articles and other related resources.
Mobile access
PubMed Central
Full-text articles from hundreds of peer-reviewed biomedical and life sciences journals.

Additional Resources

DynaMed
Dynamed is a Point of Care resource using peer reviewed literature to create summaries and provide levels of evidence for care. Links to full articles and references for resources are provided.

PEDro Physiotherapy Evidence Database
This is a non-profit organization to facilitate evidence-based physiotherapy through free search. Not all articles are free, search for the article on the library page to find full text and check for peer review.
APTA Article Search
DPT Students ONLY. You must login with your personal APTA membership account to search and find articles, or standards of practice. If you find articles not in full text, look for them using the Library Website.

Searching Guides

CINAHL Quick Searching Tutorial
CINAHL Advanced Searching Tutorial
PubMed User Guide
Limiting PubMed to Nursing Journals Journal categories & more subsets Select journal categories can be added to the sidebar using the Additional Filters button: Dental journals MEDLINE Nursing journals The Journal/Citation subsets restrict retrieval to specialized journals or articles on specialized topics in other journals. The table below lists the journal subsets, along with the code used for searching. Some subsets are closed and are no longer being assigned to current data. To search for a Journal/Citation subset, enter in the search box: jsubset?, where ? represents the subset code. The Journal/Citation subset does not require a search tag. Subset Code Journal/Citation Subset AIM Abridged Index Medicus is a list created in 1970 of approximately 120 core clinical English language journals that corresponds to "Core clinical journals" journal category selection in filters. D Dentistry journals E Citations from bioethics journals or selected bioethics citations from other journals H Health administration journals, non-Index Medicus IM Index Medicus journals K Consumer health journals N Nursing journals Q History of medicine journals and selected citations from other journals QIS Citations from non-Index Medicus journals in the field of history of medicine S Citations from space life sciences journals and selected space life sciences citations from other journals T Health technology assessment journals, non-Index Medicus X AIDS/HIV journals (selected citations from other journals 1980-2000) PubMed Central Subset To restrict retrieval to citations that have a free full-text article available in PubMed Central (PMC), search pubmed pmc[sb]. Use the PMID/PMCID/NIHMSID Converter to convert IDs for publications referenced in PubMed and PMC. To retrieve citations that include an NIHMS ID use the query, hasnihmsid. Citation Status Subsets The citation status indicates the internal processing stage of an article in the PubMed database (see PubMed Citation Status Subsets). To search for a particular citation status, enter one of the search terms below followed by the [sb] search tag: publisher inprocess medline pubmednotmedline To search for the total number of PubMed citations, enter all[sb] in the search box.
Nursing Research: Formulating Your Question Using PICO (video)
Nursing Research: Translate Your PICO Into a Search in PubMed (video)

How to Read a Scholarly Article

This video is from Western Libraries at Western University.

Is It a Scholarly Journal?

Journals and Magazines: This guide details the characteristics of each category.

Journals by Title: This search identifies scholarly journals and links to full text the library has available.

Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory: Entries include information about whether the journal or magazine is a scholarly journal, consumer magazine, etc.

Research Databases: Some allow you to limit your search to scholarly journals.

Paper journals: Frequently include instruction for authors in the front or back of the journal. Some instructions will use the phrase "peer reviewed." Others will say that manuscripts are sent for blind review, reviewed by a committee, or anonymously reviewed.