RES 6041 Module 2 Literature Search Strategy Example

Searching for How Charge Nurses Learn to Staff a Unit: A Documented, Repeatable Literature Search Strategy With Concepts, Boolean Strings, Limits and Results

Student Name

American College of Education

RES6041: Scholarly Writing and Research Strategies

Module 2 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 19, 2026

Introduction

My dissertation topic is the way hospitals ready charge nurses for staffing decisions: who gets which patients, when to call for help and how to respond when the unit is short. Module 1 showed why staffing matters to patients. This module asks a narrower question: what has already been written about preparing the nurses who make those decisions shift by shift? A good answer depends on a search that is thorough, recorded and repeatable. This paper sets out the search question and concepts, builds the strings, reports a real search run in PubMed and plans the searches still to come.

The Search Question and Its Concepts

The question guiding the search is: What is known about how charge nurses in hospitals are prepared for staffing and patient assignment decisions? Bramer et al. (2018), describing a systematic method developed by medical librarians, recommended identifying the key concepts in a question, ranking them by how specific they are and searching first for the most specific. Three concepts emerge. The population concept is charge nurses, the most specific and the one the search cannot do without. The intervention concept is preparation, which includes education, training, orientation and competency development. The context concept is staffing decisions, including patient assignment, workload and decision making.

Building Synonym Blocks

Each concept needs a block of synonyms joined by OR, since authors describe the same idea in different words. The charge nurse block includes charge nurse and charge nurses, along with shift leader and shift leaders, terms used in British, South African and some Canadian hospitals. The preparation block includes education, training, orientation, leadership development and competenc*, where the asterisk truncates the word so that competency, competencies and competence are all retrieved. The staffing block includes staffing, patient assignment and patient assignments, workload and both spellings of decision making, with and without the hyphen. Phrases are placed in quotation marks so the database treats them as units, and each term is limited to the title and abstract field, marked [tiab] in PubMed, to keep results focused.

The PubMed Search

I ran the search in PubMed on October 7, 2026. Line 1, the charge nurse block alone, returned 664 records. Combining it with the preparation block using AND, line 2, returned 202. Combining the charge nurse block with the staffing block instead, line 3, returned 93. Combining all three blocks, line 4, returned 29. Applying two limits, publication dates from 2014 to the present and English language, line 5, returned 19. A trial of adding Medical Subject Headings for staffing, nurse administrators and leadership reduced the set to 9, but it dropped relevant studies whose indexing used other headings, so the free-text version was kept. The numbers tell their own story: hundreds of papers mention charge nurses, but fewer than two dozen in a decade address how they are prepared for staffing decisions.

Testing the Strategy

A search can look tidy and still miss what matters, so I tested it against studies I already knew. Before running the strings, I listed the two emergency nursing studies of charge nurse training I had found through a colleague. Both appeared in the final 19 records, which suggests the blocks capture the core literature. Bramer et al. (2018) recommended this kind of check, comparing a search's results against a small set of known relevant articles and revising the strings when any are missing. I also ran the search once without the staffing block's decision-making terms; the count fell from 19 to 16, and the South African shift leader study, one of the four later retained, dropped out, so those terms stayed.

Screening the Results

I read the titles and abstracts of all 19 records. Fifteen were excluded because charge nurses appeared only in passing, for example in studies of compassion fatigue, trauma triage or staffing patterns in intensive care units in which the charge nurse was not the focus. Four were retained. Two came from the same emergency nursing research team. Wolf et al. (2022) used mixed methods to examine the role and training of emergency department charge nurses and found that participants reported minimal training for the role and divergent understandings of what it required. Wolf et al. (2024) followed with a study that surveyed 427 emergency nurse leaders and charge nurses and held focus groups to identify and validate charge nurse competencies, ranking patient flow management, communication, situational awareness, clinical decision making and nurse-patient assignment highest. The other two retained studies examined new intensive care nurses serving as shift leaders in South Africa and senior charge nurses' supervisory role in Scotland.

What the First Search Shows

The first search suggests two things. The literature on charge nurse preparation is thin, which supports the gap my dissertation will address. And the strongest recent work comes from emergency departments, which leaves inpatient medical-surgical units, where most of our hospital's charge nurses work, largely unstudied. Both observations are provisional until the other databases have been searched, since nursing education research is often indexed more fully in CINAHL than in PubMed.

Searches Still to Run

The same three blocks will be translated for CINAHL, using its subject headings where they fit, such as the heading for charge nurses if the database provides one, and for ERIC, which indexes education research and may hold studies of nurse leadership training. Bramer et al. (2018) stressed that search strings must be adapted to each database's syntax and vocabulary rather than pasted unchanged. Two further strategies will catch what database searches miss: backward citation searching, reading the reference lists of the four retained studies, and forward citation searching, checking which later papers cite them. Gray literature, including the American Organization for Nursing Leadership's resources and dissertations in ProQuest, will be searched for program descriptions that never reached journals.

The Search Log

Every search is recorded in a log with the date, the database and platform, the exact string for each line, the limits applied, the number of results and notes on decisions, such as the rejected subject heading trial. The log for October 7 has five lines and one trial line. Search results are exported to a reference manager with the search date in a tag, and screening decisions are recorded with a reason for each exclusion. A reader of my literature review will be able to see what was searched, when and how, and could rerun the PubMed search and expect similar numbers, allowing for new publications.

Limitations of the Strategy

The strategy has limits. Restricting terms to titles and abstracts may miss studies that discuss charge nurse preparation only in their full text. Limiting to English excludes work from countries where charge nurse roles are well developed. And the date limit, chosen to focus on the last decade, will exclude older foundational studies, which citation searching is meant to recover. Each limit is a trade-off between precision and completeness, and the log notes why each one was chosen.

Conclusion

A three-concept search in PubMed narrowed 664 charge nurse records to 19 and then, after screening, to four relevant studies, two of them from emergency nursing. The strategy will now be repeated in CINAHL and ERIC, extended by citation searching and gray literature and recorded in a log that makes it repeatable. Module 3 organizes what the searches find in a synthesis matrix.

References

Bramer, W. M., De Jonge, G. B., Rethlefsen, M. L., Mast, F., & Kleijnen, J. (2018). A systematic approach to searching: An efficient and complete method to develop literature searches. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 106(4), 531-541. https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2018.283

Wolf, L., Delao, A., Simon, C., Clark, P., & Burchill, C. N. (2024). Ensuring throughput: Development and validation of charge nurse competencies for United States emergency care settings. Journal of Emergency Nursing, 50(4), 523-536. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jen.2024.02.009

Wolf, L., Perhats, C., Delao, A., Burchill, C. N., Clark, P., Callihan, M., Edwards, C., Frisch, S., Moon, M., & Strout, T. (2022). Role and training of emergency department charge nurses: A mixed methods analysis of processes, needs, and expectations. Journal of Emergency Nursing, 48(4), 390-405. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jen.2022.03.009