The Peculiarities of a Nursing Term Paper
Generally speaking, nursing is a complex subject that deals with numerous multi-faceted concepts and phenomena. As a healthcare profession, nursing provides an important background for healthcare workers and ensures specialized education for nurses through practicing and caring for patients. That is why nursing research is of crucial scientific value as it can potentially improve nursing practice and facilitate the improved quality of care.
The Nursing term paper is a type of written assignments that are usually completed by students engaged in nursing, healthcare, and other specialized subjects related to these fields. At the end of the course, students are usually required to write a Nursing term paper and expand practical skills by exploring their theoretical background and performing their own research.
The project has much in common with a research paper. However, the term paper, being a kind of testimony of the attained knowledge and the level of proficiency, requires more in-depth research with the use of different statistics and complex methodology. To receive a good mark for your Nursing term paper, you should follow the professor’s requirements and perform individual research on a relevant topic. Since nursing is related to Healthcare and Medical Sciences, it is important to explore the subject of your analysis from different perspectives. Also, you should support your thesis with arguments and examples developed on the basis of reliable factual information and statistical data. The key element of a successful Nursing term paper is a critical evaluation of the main results and findings of the author’s research. Everything mentioned above proves that it is not easy to write a high-quality Nursing term paper. However, with some nursing term paper writing tips, you’ll ease the process and make it more interesting and understandable while getting nursing assignment help from experts.
Choosing a Topic for the Nursing Term Paper: Our Writers’ Advice
A properly chosen topic for a Nursing term paper is a halfway to the successfully completed work. Usually, professors provide students with different topics to choose from. If you don’t happen to have them all or the existing topics do not match your skills or scientific interest, ensure to come up with your own topic. It should be related to the topics covered during the course. Besides, it is important to find a topic that you’ve always been interested in or the one that you care about. Assess the potential topic to see if your theoretical knowledge and practical skills are enough to create a research paper.
The relevance of the topic to the contemporary nursing practice is not less crucial than its correspondence to your interests. You should choose a topic that has been discussed in recent years so that it would be easy to find credible and not outdated sources. At the same time, you should introduce some novelty into the topic as your research should be authentic and not copied from the existing scientific works. In this case, you can explore some well-known issues from a new perspective or change the variables or the individuals targeted in the study. Also, pay attention to whether it is wide enough to find a sufficient number of credible and relevant sources to develop a term paper. At the same time, the topic shouldn’t be too broad as it will be difficult for you to cover all the information and structure the paper properly. On the contrary, if the topic is too narrow, you won’t be able to expand your research in the future. To be sure that you can find the needed information, make a research work before the topic is chosen and agreed upon with your instructor. Check the topic’s relevance as well as the state of its scientific grounding in contemporary studies.
Based on these tips, the potential topics for Nursing research paper can be the following:
- Nursing Care for Patients with Autism Spectrum Disorder
- Patient-Nurse Communication as a Determinant of Recovery
- Family Planning Strategies for Patients with HIV
- The Impact of Mandatory Overtime on the Quality of Care
- A Historical View on the Role of Pain Management Nurse
- The Effects of the Lack of Geriatric Training for Nurses
Finding Trusted Sources for Nursing Term Paper Writing
After choosing the topic, you should search for relevant and reliable sources to explore all the aspects of the topic in detail. You can search for them either in the library or on the Internet. Ensure to analyze the information found online critically as there are numerous websites that provide unreliable and unproven information. To ensure that your sources are reliable, you can use different specialized databases and academic journals. If your professor provides you with the list of helpful sites, visit them first and add them to your reference pages. The following online sources can be used for writing a Nursing Term Paper:
- websites ending with .gov or .edu since they are relevant and can be utilized for academic purposes;
- academic journals that specialize in Nursing, Healthcare, Medicine, and different sub-fields;
- general and specialized databases, online libraries.
There are different websites and databases created specifically for nursing and medicine-related topics. The most popular among them are:
- PubMed – an online service that is a part of the National Library of Medicine; it provides numerous important citations as well as additional books and databases related to nursing and other life sciences;
- CINAHL Plus – an online database that contains helpful resources on nursing and allied health;
- Cochrane Library – an online library covering medical evidence helpful for grounding clinical treatment decisions;
- Nursing Reference Center Plus – a database that provides credible, evidence-based information on nursing practice;
- MEDLINE – a bibliographic database with academic articles in different fields of medicine, including nursing, veterinary, healthcare management, and others.
Once you have enough credible sources to gather all the needed information for your Nursing term paper, you can start the pre-writing process, which is not less important.
Pre-Writing Stage: Planning and Preparing Activities
When you have the topic and some major sources for your Nursing term paper, it means that you have pictured your paper and its main accents in your mind somehow. However, you may not know where and how to start. To make it easier, you can turn to different pre-writing activities to establish the main focus of the paper and generate new ideas for successful research. First of all, pre-writing activities should be based on the information that you already know about the topic and the issues related to the topic. That is why it is important to start the research process and accumulate knowledge related to the topic before you define the main points of your paper. After that, you can use the method called “brainstorming.” Brainstorming implies writing down a list of all the ideas related to the topic that come up to your mind.
The other helpful strategy, which is somehow similar to the first one, is “freewriting.” This strategy is about writing down ideas in the form of sentences. It can help to expand the initial idea and develop new perspectives, from which the topic may be further explored.
The last strategy is known as “mind mapping.” While you should create a kind of graphic representation of your topic, the method mentioned above helps to visualize the ideas. More precisely, you have to decide what the leading ideas of your future paper are and write them down in circles. After that, you should also write down the supporting ideas and connect them to the primary ones by drawing lines.
After the ideas are created, and the main aspects of the analyzed topic are defined, you can create an outline of your paper. It is a plan that will help you to structure all the parts of the paper and make it logical and consistent. The outline revolves around your topic and the thesis statement and lists the main points of your future paper. Also, the whole pre-writing process includes developing drafts and reviewing them to highlight the most important information.
The Structure and the Format of the Nursing Term Paper
To receive the highest mark, you should develop your Nursing term paper according to a particular structure and format. Look through the professor’s requirements and follow the format that is mentioned in the instructions. Usually, Nursing term papers are created with the use of APA format. In this case, the format defines the structure. An APA-formatted paper consists of the title page, the abstract, the main body, and the reference list. According to the requirements of the APA referencing style, your paper should be typed in twelve-point Times New Roman font. In-text citations should contain the author’s last name and the year of the work’s publication separated by a comma. If you insert the citation directly from a certain page of a publication or its online version, you can mention the page number as well. For more detailed instructions on how to format the paper, you can visit helpful websites like PurdueOwl or use citation-generating engines.
You should decide on the structure of your Nursing term paper when developing an outline. If your professor has some special requirements regarding the structure of the paper, follow them. Traditionally, an APA-formatted Nursing term paper consists of the following parts:
- Title Page. The title page of the paper should contain the name of the topic, the running head, the author’s name, and the name of the institution he/she attends. It should contain some keywords that attract attention and help the audience to understand the main focus of the paper.
- Abstract. Write an abstract of your paper on a separate page typing the word “Abstract” in the center of it. The abstract should reveal the main points of your research with an emphasis on scientific novelty and relevance as well as your individual evaluation of the findings.
- Main Body. The main body should consist of the introduction, the main body paragraphs, and the conclusion. In the introduction, you should set the backgrounds of your research and explain the importance of the paper. The most significant element of the introduction is the thesis statement. It is usually the last part of the introduction section that explains the main argument of the paper. After that, in the main body section, you should explore in detail all the arguments mentioned in the abstract and in the introduction. The arguments should be supported by factual information, statistical data, real-life examples, other evidence-based information, and your own critical assessment.
- Conclusion. In the conclusion, you should summarize all the findings and accentuate the main purpose of the paper once again. The conclusion should not contain the information that was not mentioned in the paper before.
- Reference Page. The reference page is a separate page that goes after the main body. The title of this page contains the word “References” only. The sources used in the paper should be formatted according to the requirements of the APA referencing style and listed in the alphabetical order.
Proofreading to Ensure Everything Looks & Sounds Good
Once you’re done with the writing part, you have to proofread and edit the piece if necessary. First of all, you should check grammar and punctuation as these elements reflect your overall academic knowledge. For this purpose, you can use some online websites like Grammarly that would help you find the most common mistakes and provide you with an explanation of your mistake. Ensure to check your paper for plagiarism as only authentic papers can receive high marks and show a high level of proficiency and knowledge. Besides, mind the word choice, and the overall style of the paper as academic papers have a certain requirement regarding their style. For instance, you should not use idioms, phrasal verbs, contractions or stylistically marked words. If it’s too difficult for you to detect your own mistakes, you can ask another person for help. For instance, your friend or parent can read your term paper and give you a helpful response highlighting the strengths and the weaknesses of your paper. Thus, you’ll focus your attention on the weak parts of the paper and improve them. Consequently, if you follow all the tips listed above, you will create a high-quality Nursing term paper, as well as improve your academic writing skills. If you need professional help from a nursing paper writing service – please visit our company right now.
Reference
- “Essay Help: 5 Tips for Writing Nursing Research Papers.” LinkedIn SlideShare, 16 Mar. 2013, www.slideshare.net/EssaysExperts/essay-help-5-tips-for-writing-nursing-research-papers.
- “How to Write a Term Paper: Outline, Topics, Format | EssayPro.” Essay Writing with EssayPro, Essay Writing with EssayPro, 11 July 2018, essaypro.com/blog/term-paper/.
- “100 Nursing Research Paper Topics for College Students.” Last Minute Assignment Help, 30 Dec. 2016, www.lastminuteassignmenthelp.com/100-nursing-research-paper-topics-college-students/.
- “Nursing: Databases for Articles, Etc.” Subject & Course Guides, researchguides.uic.edu/c.php?g=252186&p=1684967.
- “Tips for Writing a Research Paper.” NMU Student Organizations, May 2011, www.nmu.edu/writingcenter/tips-writing-research-paper.