Cabrillo College Library

Adrienne Saxton

What's here

1. Books

2. Dictionaries

3. Articles

4. What's available via Google

5. Evaluating

6. Images and videos

7. Researching & writing an academic paper

Getting to this page


    Name_____________________

  1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage <http://libwww.cabrillo.edu/>
  2. Click on Internet Links (third icon down on left)
  3. Click on Health Science
  4. Under Course-Related Materials, click on HS 10, Personal Health, A. Saxton
  5. Make this page a Favorite so you can easily go back and forth between this Web page and the other
    resources you are exploring.     I may have already done this for you in the classroom. Click on Favorites
    to see.
1. Find books using the Cabrillo Library Online Catalog
  1. From the Cabrillo College Library homepage
  2. Click on Library Catalog
  3. Do a Keyword Search -- the opening screen -- to search for a book on a topic of interest to you. Or,
    use one of these topics:
  • respiratory organs
  • healthy aging
  • cancer
  • cardiovascular disease

Title of a book on your topic________________________________________________

Call number____________________________________________________________

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:

  1. From the Cabrillo College Library homepage
  2. Click on Full Text Articles (second icon down on left)
  3. Under General, click on NetLibrary E-Books
  4. Search for a book on your topic.

Title of a book on your topic______________________________________________________

You can access the electronic books from off campus with your library card number.

2. Find encyclopedias and subject dictionaries
  1. From the Cabrillo College Library homepage
  2. Click on Full Text Articles
  3. Under Encyclopedias/Background Information, click on Credo reference

You can search 28 medical dictionaries simultaneously! Plus there are lots of subject encyclopedias
available. Wow!

Search for information on your topic.

What did you find? _______________________________________________________________________

3. Find Magazine and Journal Articles
  1. From the Cabrillo Library homepage
  2. Click on Full Text Articles (second icon down on left)

The primary periodical databases available at the Cabrillo College Library for this course are grouped together:

From off campus you need to enter your library barcode number to get access to these databases..

In the world of periodicals, there are both magazines and journals. Magazines are popular, written for broad
audiences. Journals publish 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.

  1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage http://libwww.cabrillo.edu
  2. Click on Full Text Articles (second icon down, on left)
  3. Under Health & Medicine, click on Academic Search Premier

Here's a sample search for articles in Academic Search Premier for articles on cardiovascular disease
and its impacts.

The asterisk (*) after the word impact means that the search will be for impact or impacts.

Note how the search is limited to Full Text and Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals.

If you use too many limits, you'll get zero results. But, play around to see how you can search more precisely.

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??

Use Academic Search Premier to search for an article on your topic. What did you find?

Article author(s)________________________________________________________________

Article title____________________________________________________________________

Title of journal (look where it says Source)___________________________________________

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 articles, as
shown below.

The search interface there is different, and the results list offers opportunities to get additional articles
on the same topic in different ways.

  1. Go to Medline at PubMed -- www.pubmed.gov
  2. Click on Limits and select Links to free full text
  3. Type in your search terms and click Go

Here's a sample search -- note that the box next to Links to free full text has been checked.

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.

Search Medline on the Web and identify some articles on your topic.

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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.

Go to scholar.google.com and search for articles on your topic. Make notes here about what
you find:

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4. Use Search Tools to Find Web Pages

We all use Google as our primary search engine. It's the biggest, the most innovative, and the best. Really.

Here is a search on Google. Note that it's a Web search.

as

In this search result, Google is saying: there are a number of ways of sorting your search results. Click on show options --

as

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.

Use Google Books <http://books.google.com> to find some good quality resources on your topic.
Make notes here about what you find so you can return to these resources later:

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Google is digitizing millions of books from many libraries. Google Book Partners. Description and timeline
of the Google Book Project. Robot digitizer used by Stanford. Here's video of another 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. To go to Google books directly, it's books.google.com.

Use Google to find some good quality resources on your topic. Make notes here about what you
find so you can return to these resources later:

______________________________________________________________________________

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5. Evaluating Web sites

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.

6. Images and videos

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.

7. Researching and writing an academic paper

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:

  1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage <http://libwww.cabrillo.edu>
  2. Click on Full Text Articles
  3. Click on NetLibrary eBooks
  4. Look up the title: The Research Project: How to Write It. There are several similar books available
    as well.

Getting to this page on the Internet

  1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library home page <libwww.cabrillo.edu>
  2. Click on Internet Links, then click on Health Science
  3. Under Course-Related Materials, click on HS 10,  Personal Health, A. Saxton

A. Saxton; T. N. Smalley last rev. 9/09