NR-505NP Week 2 turns the question you wrote into a search somebody else could repeat and get your results. The graded skill at this stage is documentation rather than discovery: which databases, which terms, which limits, how many hits, how many kept, and on what grounds the rest were dropped. Your section may print this as NR 505NP or NR505NP; it is the same course. Chamberlain publishes no syllabi outside Canvas. The placement here is our teaching judgment from the course's catalog arc; your section's rubric decides what your week actually asks.
What NR-505NP Week 2 asks for
A search in an evidence-based practice course is a method section, not a shopping trip. The territory covers where nursing and medical evidence actually lives, how controlled vocabulary differs from the words you would say out loud, and how the mechanics of combining terms change what comes back. Subject headings are the part most students skip and the part that separates a search returning eleven relevant papers from one returning nine hundred loosely related ones. The heading vocabulary in a nursing index and the heading vocabulary in a biomedical index are not the same list, which is why a single database rarely satisfies a graduate rubric.
The second half of the territory is filtering with a stated rule. Inclusion and exclusion criteria are decisions you make in advance and then apply, not adjectives you attach afterwards to justify the papers you liked. Publication window, language, population age band, setting and design all belong in that rule, and each one should have a reason a grader can follow. Excluding studies published before a stated year because practice changed after a guideline revision is a defensible rule. Excluding them because there were too many to read is not.
Deliverable shape here is often a search documentation table plus a short narrative, sometimes with an annotated list of the sources you kept. If your section runs a discussion this week, expect to compare search strategies with classmates, and remember that Canvas posts do not reopen once submitted, so an unsupported claim about what your search returned stays visible for the rest of the session.
The NR-505NP Week 2 method, step by step
Five moves that produce a search a stranger could rerun, and a record that scores.
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Split the question into concept blocks
Take each element of your question and give it its own line. Under each line, list every way the literature might name that concept: the clinical term, the lay term, the abbreviation, the older term still used in papers from a decade ago. You are building three or four vocabulary sets, not one string.
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Find the controlled heading for each block
Look each concept up in the database's own thesaurus before typing free text. Note the exact heading, note whether you want it exploded to include narrower terms, and note where the nursing index and the biomedical index use different words for the same idea. Record both headings; you will need them for the second database.
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Combine within blocks, then across them
Join synonyms inside a block with OR so the block captures the concept however it is named. Join the blocks with AND so only papers touching every concept survive. Run each block on its own first and write down its count, because those separate counts are what tell you which concept is strangling the search.
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Apply limits you can defend in a sentence
Add the publication window, language, age group and any design filter one at a time, recording the count after each. A limit that removes four hundred results deserves a sentence explaining why those four hundred were out of scope; a limit that removes two is probably not worth reporting.
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Screen in two passes and record the attrition
Read titles and abstracts first against your stated criteria, then read the survivors in full. Write down how many entered each pass and how many left, with the dominant reason for exclusion at each stage. Then check the reference lists of your two best papers, and record anything you picked up that way as hand searching rather than pretending the database found it.
A layout and word budget for search documentation
The frame below is what our tutors use for a search strategy write-up of roughly 1,000 to 1,200 words plus its table. It is our own outline rather than anything the university issues, and your week's rubric outranks it wherever the two disagree. A longer or shorter assignment moves every figure here in proportion to the cap you were given.
| Component | What belongs in it | Word target |
|---|---|---|
| Question restated | The question in one sentence with its elements labeled, so the search can be checked against it. | 60 to 80 |
| Databases and why each | Each database named with one clause on what it indexes that the others do not. | 110 to 140 |
| Term table | Concept blocks down the side, controlled headings and free text terms across, with the combining operators shown. | Table, plus 90 to 120 of narrative |
| Limits and criteria | Each limit with the reason it was applied, and the inclusion and exclusion rules written before screening. | 200 to 240 |
| Yield and screening | Counts at each stage, with the dominant exclusion reason per stage and any hand searching named separately. | 200 to 250 |
| What the yield tells you | Whether the body of evidence is large, thin, dated or dominated by one design, and what that means for the weeks ahead. | 180 to 220 |
Evidence craft for searching and source selection
Peer reviewed is a setting, not a guarantee. Ticking the peer review box removes trade magazines and keeps predatory titles, so the judgment still belongs to you. Where you are unsure about a journal, check whether it is indexed in the databases your library subscribes to and whether its editorial board is identifiable, and say in your write-up how you checked.
Primary and secondary sources answer to different rules. A systematic review is a legitimate find and often the single most useful paper in your yield, but it reports other people's studies. If your rubric asks for primary research reports, a review counts as background rather than as evidence, and mining its reference list for the underlying studies is the move that keeps both roles satisfied.
Report the searches that failed. A strategy that returned nothing and had to be widened is method, and describing it earns the documentation row. Silently dropping it leaves a gap a grader can see, because the term table and the final yield will not line up.
Cite the record you actually used. Where you retrieved a paper through a database that reprinted an abstract, the citation belongs to the original journal article, and the retrieval detail belongs in your narrative rather than in the reference entry. Mixing the two produces reference list errors that the writing row picks up every time.
Five mistakes that cost points in this week's territory
- One database, one string. A single free text search in a single index cannot be defended as a graduate search strategy, whatever it returned.
- Counts reported only at the end. A final number with no stage counts hides the screening entirely, and screening is the part the rubric can actually assess.
- Criteria written after the reading. Rules invented to fit the papers you already chose read as reverse engineering, and a grader spots it when the criteria are unusually convenient.
- Subject headings ignored. Free text alone misses papers that use a term you did not think of, and it returns papers where your words appear in passing.
- A yield described as a lot of research. Say how much, of what design, published when. Volume without shape tells the reader nothing about the evidence you are about to appraise.
Before you submit
- Two or more databases are named with a reason for each
- Controlled headings appear alongside free text terms for every concept block
- The combining operators are visible, not just implied by the table layout
- Every limit carries a one clause justification
- Counts are reported at initial yield, after limits, after title screening and after full text review
- Hand searched sources are labeled as such rather than folded into the database totals
Building the NR-505NP search this week?
Send the instructions and your week's rubric out of Canvas. A premium original draft comes back in 24 to 48 hours with the term table built, the limits justified and the screening counts laid out, and revisions run until the grade lands.