Guidelines are frequently published as articles in peer-reviewed journals. These publications may be referred to as guidelines, practice guidelines, clinical practice guidelines, recommendations, or consensus statements.
To find guideline articles in professional health sciences journals, the best place to start is with a research database.
CINAHL Complete is the world's most comprehensive nursing & allied health research database, providing full text for more than 1,350 journals indexed in CINAHL. Of those, 953 are not found with full text in any version of Academic Search, Health Source or Nursing & Allied Health Collection. This authoritative file contains full text for many of the most used journals in the CINAHL index, with no embargo. With full-text coverage dating back to 1937, CINAHL Complete is the definitive research tool for all areas of nursing and allied health literature.
There are three ways to filter your results in CINHAL to show guidelines. The first one is making the selection in the Advance Search option by scrolling down to the publication type option and selecting practice guidelines.
The second option is to conduct your search for your topic after retrieving a list of results; go to the limits option on the left side and, under publication, see if there are any guidelines listed; if not, click show more for fuller list options.
The third option is to search CINAHL by adding practice guidelines as a subject in your search since this term is a CINAHL heading.
There are two options to search for guidelines in PubMed. The first option while conducting a search, is to use the Article Type filter: Guideline, Practice Guideline, Consensus Development Conference, or Consensus Development Conference NIH. If you do not see any of those options, click on additional filters to add those options to the article type category.
The second option is to include in your search any of the following subject/field-specific commands: "practice guideline"[Publication Type] OR "practice guidelines as topic"[MeSH] OR "guideline"[Publication Type] OR "guidelines as topic"[MeSH] OR "consensus development conference"[Publication Type] OR "consensus development conferences as topic"[MeSH]
While UpToDate topics are not practice guidelines; many UpToDate topics cite practice guidelines and include a link to "Society Guidelines" toward the bottom of the left navigation column. You can also search Society Guideline in search box to see a list of topics that contain links to guidelines.
APA has specific format for guidelines check out the following articles from APA:
