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What's here 4. What's available via Google |
Getting started
Electronic books The library offers you an extraordinary collection of electronic books, currently numbering about 15,000. The amazing thing is that you can search words used inside of all those thousands of book. This is a great approach to getting very specific information about narrow topics. The easiest way to get access to them:
The primary periodical databases available at the Cabrillo College Library for this course are grouped together:
In the world of periodicals, there are both magazines and journals. Magazines are popular, written for broad audiences. Journals are peer-reviewed (articles are submitted to journal editors who send them to academic peers in the discipline who review them) and written for academic audiences. Here's a sample search for articles in Alt HealthWatch for the topic psoriasis
Some of the databases also offer you a way to limit to evidence-based practice, alternative therapies and case studies. For example, this is from CINAHL Plus. CINAHL stands for Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature -- it's the major periodicals database for nursing and allied health.
If you use too many limits, you'll get zero results. But, play around to see how you can search more precisely. The database may sort your results for you. Here you can click to see only magazines, or only academic journals, etc.
MEDLINE is another major medical database for you to use. Like the nursing database, it is available via EBSCOhost. Medline is also available free online from the National Library of Medicine (NLM). Medline is the world's largest database for medical science. The articles you retrieve may be quite technical in nature. Most will not be available full text. But, you can limit your search to just the full text, as I show below. The search interface there is different, and the results list offers opportunities to get additional articles on the same topic in different ways.
Here's a sample search -- note that the box next to Links to free full text has been checked.
Here's the beginning of the results list:
You click on the
illustrated pages
and over on the right is your link to full text and links to related articles.
If you find information about an article that is not available full text in the database you are using, ask at the Reference Desk for an interlibrary loan -- we'll find a library that has it and will get a photocopy for you. Sometimes this process that can take a week to ten days, so it's good to plan ahead. Google has a database for (mostly) periodical articles -- it's called Scholar. The URL to get there directly is scholar.google.com, or you can switch over to it by clicking on More once you're in Google. By now there is enough good and often full text material in Scholar that it is worth a look. Here's a sample search:
Note
how you can search for recent articles by using
We all use Google as our primary search engine. It's the biggest, the most innovative, and the best. Really. The big news about Google is that it has changed recently. Since July 2007, it now performs what it calls universal searches. It will search several of its databases simultaneously. From now on, you don't just have to know you're using Google, you have to know where in Google you are. ; -) Here is a search on Google. Note that it's a Web search. However, in this search result, Google is saying: wow! besides the Web stuff, there are some books you may want to look at on this topic. Sweet!
Google is digitizing millions of books from 27 libraries -- all of Stanford, all of Harvard, all of University of California, all of Oxford University in England and 23 other large beautiful libraries. Description and timeline of the Google Book Project. Robot digitizer used by Stanford. Every single page in every book is being digitized, but not every page of every book is available -- yet. There's a publishers' lawsuit that restricts access to recently published titles. But information wants to be free, I think, and it will eventually work out. Even at this stage, there are vast amounts of full text available that it is useful to explore. To go to Google books directly, it's books.google.com. Would you believe it? Bill Gates and Microsoft want to digitize books too!! Go to books.live.com. It's a snazier system, I think. There are not as many books there as are at Google's book database, but millions is lots to me. And more are being added all the time.
The Web is an open publishing environment. Anyone can publish, and sometimes it seems as though everyone does! It is very important to evaluate what you find. In searching the Web, you want to use resources that are not only recent and relevant to your topic, but that are also based on reliable, believable information resources. A savvy Web user on medical topics will know about and use these sources:
There are lots of places to get images on the Web. Here are two of the better collections: There are lots of places to get access to videos on the Web. The biggest, with the best quality videos is Blinkx.com. I found 341 videos at Blinkx about psoriasis! (When I did this class last semester, it was 202.)
You can use Google Books to look up chapters in books about researching and writing papers. Here are some suggestions:
Also available in the Cabrillo Library's electronic book collection is The Research Project: How to Write It -- Routledge Study Guides; 5th Ed. by Berry, Ralph. London Taylor & Francis Routledge, 2004. To get to the NetLibrary ebooks:
Getting to this page on the Internet
S. Houghton; T. N. Smalley 4/08 |
to
get to the next screen 
(and you can change that year)