Skip to Main Content

Nursing Information Literacy Tutorial

What's a Secondary Source?

Secondary sources summarize, compare, and evaluate primary information and studies to draw conclusions on or present current state of knowledge in a discipline.

Secondary Sources include:

reviews & systematic reviews
newsletters and professional news sources
practice guidelines & standards
clinical care notes
patient education information
government & legal information
monographs
entries in nursing or medical encyclopedias

Nursing Reference Center Plus This link opens in a new window
To Find Secondary Sources:
1) Go to advanced Search
2) Under document types, check off the ones you need: such as skills, patient education, legal cases, guidelines, etc.

CINAHL Complete This link opens in a new window
To Find Secondary Sources in CINAHL:
1) Select Advanced Search
2) Go to Publication Type and select meta analysis, standards, systematic reviews, practice guidelines, etc.
(Hold down the CTRL key to select multiple items in the list)

ScienceDirect This link opens in a new window
To Find Secondary Sources in Science Direct:
1) Go to Advanced Search
2) Under article types, check off encyclopedia and practice guidelines

Magill's Medical Guide This link opens in a new window
This guide is a secondary source since it is a medical encyclopedia.