Given that the term history is used in clinical nursing, e.g., to take a patient's history, researchers need to use other terms and strategies to retrieve content on the history of a biomedical topic.
- Strategies typically avoid phrases such as "nursing history" or "history of nursing." These phrases may deliver relevant content, but the results are often skewed toward clinical topics.
Some proven strategies are to conduct searches that combine the main topic with a descriptive secondary topic
e.g. nurs* AND "Crimean war"
- phrases that depict an era : Post-War, Inter-war years, Vietnam war, Civil war, Eisenhower Era - since much nursing history is linked to military history, this is a good strategy to get at the information
- decades: 1960's, 1910's
- use the name of a person: "Florence Nightingale", the name of a nursing theorist
