PH5100: Master of Public Health Tutorial

TIPS ON GOVERNMENT SEARCHING

It may be appropriate to search for scholarly information on the web.  Usually this is when you are looking for:

• your professional organizations, and expert websites  -  Often these publish their own journal, or other publications, and some online access is usually free.
• a very recent topic (cutting edge)
• statistics or government info
• dissertations
• unpublished or obscure information

Here are a few we recommend.

Government sites:

• National Institutes of Health (NIH)
• MedlinePlus (NIH consumer health database)
• Center for Disease Control (CDC)
• FastStats (CDC)
• Food & Nutrition Information Center (U.S. National Agricultural Library)
• healthypeople.gov
• WA Dept of Health

Non-profit organization & association sites:

• American Public Health Association

Educational sites:

• National Commission for Health Education Credentialing

Websites can be excellent research sources, but require critical thinking skills to determine whether or not they offer credible information. Here are some criteria to consider:

Why can't I just Google to find research on my topic?  Being an efficient searcher means knowing when to use what tool. Databases are more likely to retrieve relevant scholarly journal articles (both primary and secondary) than Google, a general search engine.

This video, Library Databases versus Search Engines, shows you how these differences affect your searches. (Created by the Wellington Medical and Health Sciences Library, 2010).

Try using Google Scholar rather than Google when searching for research studies on the web.

Google Scholar is a specialized search engine that only searches for scholarly papers. Bonus! Access it through the MyBU>Library Databases page, for Bastyr library's full text offerings; sort by date to get the most current research.

Advantages:

• It screens out .com (commercial) sites.
• Results include articles, theses, books, from academic publishers, professional societies, universities, science websites, etc.
• Useful for cutting edge and/or little researched topics because it searches broadly.

Disadvantages:

• You can't find out exactly what's being searched; "spiders" crawl the web to retrieve results.
• Many retrieved items aren’t full text.
• Lacks sophisticated limiting and focusing features that research databases offer.