Nursing & Health Sciences - Basics For Online Students  

The Kraemer Family Library's home page www.uccs.edu/library is your research “launch pad.”  The “blue boxes” provide links to research resources:

• Kraemer Library Catalog (place to look for books and other materials owned by KFL)
• Select a database (databases are places to look for journal articles)
• Journal search (use this feature to find out if KFL owns a particular journal that you need).

Set up your VPN connection. If you are off-campus, you must use a VPN connection to access KFL’s journal databases and other online resources.  Once it's installed, you must logon to the VPN before you begin your research from an off-campus computer. 

Set up your Interlibrary Loan Account (ILLiad) so you can order and receive journal articles that KFL does not own.

Before writing a paper or conducting a literature review, identify keywords, terms, and concepts that you can use to search for information on your topic. Realize that you may need to:

•  narrow your topic if it is too broad (clue: you find too much information about it), or

•  broaden your topic if it is too narrow (clue: you find little or no information about it). 

Use the Online Reference Collection to find general and specialized dictionaries, encyclopedias, and directories, that you can access online.

For example, this is where you will find links to, A Dictionary of Nursing and the Oxford Dictionary of Sports Science and Medicine, both are specialized dictionaries found in the Oxford Reference Online collection of medicine resources (Oxford Reference Online is found under the Dictionaries & Thesauri link)—VPN required for off-campus access.

Also, try searching the Kraemer Library Catalog for specialized dictionaries and reference resources that may be available to you online. 

Visit Tutorials & Guides for tips on how to evaluate resources on the web; how to cite your sources; how to find government information; and more.

For example, this is where you'll find SPLINT, a tutorial for KFL nursing and health sciences students. It covers the basics of scholarly research and resource evaluation.