NURSING+

About This Site


NURSING+ is a service of McMaster University's Health Information Research Unit. It incorporates the McMasterPLUSTM email alerting system and searchable database of best evidence from the health care literature of particular interest to nursing professionals.

Users of NURSING+ with interests in a specific clinical problem or treatment are invited to use Search to look up topics covered in the McMasterPLUSTM database starting from 2003.

Subscribers can choose to receive e-mail alerts matched to their areas of clinical interest in several ways:

  1. By age of patients (eg, neonatal, geriatric)
  2. By ratings of nurses who have reviewed article as participants in the McMaster Online Rating of Evidence service (MORE).
  3. By area of clinical specialization (38 choices, eg, mental health, public health, surgery)
  4. By topic (100s of choices, eg, diabetes). Only available in our Premium service.



What are the features of NURSING+?

The current features of NURSING+ include:

Feature Basic Premium
Price Free $15.00 CAD per year
searching – a cumulative searchable database of articles that is continuously updated (from 2003 forward)

searching – extended to PubMed via clinical search filters (for searches yielding few PLUS results)

alerts - e-mail alerts about new evidence by area of specialization (eg, public health)

alerts - e-mail alerts about new evidence by clinical topic (eg, diabetes)

alerts - e-mail alerts about new evidence retrieved by your saved searches

article records - ratings of each eligible article for clinical relevance and newsworthiness by at least 3 practitioners for each specialty for which the article might be pertinent

article records - per specialty ratings, not just average overall ratings for all specialties combined

article records - links to the article's abstract via PubMed (if available) and fulltext article via PubMed or the publisher's site (if available for free)

article records - link from one article record to other articles in the same topic area

article records - view comments entered by MORE raters

article records - comment on articles, and view comments entered by other NURSING+ users

saving - citations can be download in multiple formats (for reading, citation management)

saving - individual article records can be saved to your profile

saving - searches can be saved to your profile, and alerts can be generated when new articles are added

user-responsive design (for smart phones and any other devices)

links to evidence-based resources (guides, centers, calculators)




What do the clinical ratings in NURSING+ mean?

The current features of PLUS include:

  • systematic review of over 120 journals (including all Cochrane reviews relevant to nursing) with selection of articles by expert research staff concerning the cause, course, diagnosis, prediction, prevention, and treatment of health problems, quality improvement and health economics, according to explicit criteria, with high reproducibility and periodic quality assurance checks*
  • ratings of each eligible article for clinical relevance and newsworthiness by at least 3 practitioners for each specialty for which the article might be pertinent

* Wilczynski NL, McKibbon KA, Haynes RB. Enhancing retrieval of best evidence for health care from bibliographic databases: calibration of the hand search of the literature. Medinfo. 2001;10(Pt 1):390-3.