Nursing Research

This page covers some ways to determine if an article is credible. It is recommended that you check all of the different criteria before deciding to use an article for your project.

Need to determine what kind of study you're looking at? Read our guide on NURS study methodologies.

The process of having academics double-check each other's work is called peer review. The authors will submit their article to a journal, and as part of the submission process other experts in the same field of study will read through and fact-check the article. After a series of back-and forth between the authors revising the article and the reviewers reviewing the revisions the article will eventually be published in a peer-reviewed journal. Not everything in a journal is peer reviewed. A few examples of things in peer-reviewed journals which may not be peer reviewed include: letters, opinions, editorials, and pre-prints. If you are unsure of whether an article has been peer reviewed or not, most journals will have a section about their submission process where you can find more information.

Whether or not an author is credible can be reviewed a handful of different ways.

• searching for the author's name on a standard search engine (such as Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go, etc.)
  • try to find pages from official sources such as universities, hospitals, etc. instead of ones that can be easily modified (like Wikis, social media sites, etc.)
  • see if any webpages questioning the author's credibility come up
• searching for the author's name on the ORCID website
  • see what other academic articles have been published by the author and if they are in related fields

Recency is more important in some fields than in others. For nursing, it is important to see if the article you want to use is recent to see if it has the most up-to-date information on the subject or if new studies contradict the paper's findings.

Double-checking is the process of seeing if your source agrees with other sources.

• finding other articles on the subject and comparing the results
• searching for articles that cite that article and seeing if they agree or disagree with the findings
  • use Google Scholar and use their "cited by" function to easily see what articles cited your article
  • for more information on finding articles that cite your article, check out the Searching for Cited Articles section of the Searching for Articles page

Articles that have not yet gone through the peer-review process are called preprints. They can be useful, especially since they can be published much quicker; however, they should be used with more caution since they have not yet been officially reviewed. If you find a preprint article that you want to use, you can look up the author's name to see if it has been officially published elsewhere following a peer-review process. The name of the article may change between publishing as a preprint and in a peer-reviewed journal, so it is important to use the author's name for the search. You can also check with your professor to see if they are willing to accept a preprint article as a source or not.