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What's on this page 2. Find Encyclopedias & Dictionaries 7. Researching & Writing an Academic Paper
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__________________________name Exploring for a topic: Health Information from the National Institutes of Health || Center for Disease Control and Prevention || World Health Organization || Medline Plus || Health and Medicine resources
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 decide if they should be published. Journal articles are written for academic audiences. Here's a sample search for articles in Academic Search Premier for articles that discuss health behavior and beliefs.
Note how the search is limited to Full Text and Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals. Once you get a list of results, click on the article title to get to the full article.
Once you bring up the whole article, note that you can click to print, email, and save the article. Also: you can click to cite it!! How cool is that??
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 shown below. Here's a sample search:
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 up to two weeks, so it's good to plan ahead.
____________________________________________________________________________ Electronic books The library offers an extraordinary collection of electronic books, currently numbering about 18,000. The amazing thing is that you can search words used inside of all those thousands of books. This is a great approach to getting very specific information about narrow topics. The easiest way to get access to them:
You can access the electronic books from off campus with your library card number. If you are off campus, when you click on the name of one of the full text databases, you'll be prompted to type in your library card number.
We all use Google as our primary search engine. It's the biggest, the most innovative, and the best. Really.
Some new features: Show options -- Google groups results. Try Wonder wheel (towards the bottom under Show options) to get newly suggested search terms! Google is digitizing millions of books. Book scanner. 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.
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, quality information resources. A savvy Web user on medical topics will know about and use these sources:
Let's do a little investigation ourselves about magnet therapy.
NOTE: I found the two journal articles using Scholar, Google's periodicals database, which is at http://scholar.com.
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.
You can use Google Books to look 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
M. Ellis and T.N. Smalley 10/09 |
The URL is http://libwww.cabrillo.edu
