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HEA 405 - Online Research Tools

Some recommendations for "mini-grant proposal" information needs:

• How big is the problem you'd like to solve?
• Which populations are affected by the problem?
• Which factors affect the problem (risk factors)?
• What funding opportunities exist?

Using Google Responsibly

Useful Info on "Web Addresses"

Domains tell you what type of site you have. More info on domains is available from ICANN.

Generic Domains:

.edu

Restricted to education websites: uncg.edu

 

.gov

Restricted to government websites: cdc.gov

 

.com

Sites engaged in commercial endeavors: amazon.com

.org

Sites for or by noncommercial organizations: Kaiser Family Foundation's statehealthfacts.org

.orgs MAY NOT have accurate content or benign intentions: martinlutherking.org/

Web Page Cautions

Who wrote the page? Is the author or sponsoring institution an authority on your topic?

• Nine Factors that Affect Your Heart's Health

Is the content well-sourced? Current?

• Diabetes-obesity link

Is the content appropriate for your project or information need? For a grant proposal, you may be asked to describe

• the scope of the problem
• populations affected by the problem
• factors contributing to the problem

Internet sources such as news articles and consumer health pages can give you background info to help you identify authorities investigating the problem and search terms to use, but news items themselves are not authoritative enough to use as references.

Use a news item to find a reliable source

How do you get from an interesting news article to the research report it is based on? Look in the news item for details:

1. Name of researcher or original author?
2. Institutional affiliation of researcher (university, government office, etc.)?
3. Location or date research was carried out?
4. Topic and population being studied?

Use Google to search for the author, institutional affiliation, and any specific details about the research study. If you're very lucky, you'll get to the full text online right away. If not, look for exact publication information. Was the report published in a journal? If so, use Journal Finder on the library home page to look for the article. If we don't own the journal, you can request the article through InterLibrary Loan.

Google within a domain to find authoritative results

Google has a number of useful search features. The one I tend to use the most is the domain or site search. It will search for pages indexed by Google within an entire domain such as .gov, or it will search within a particular website such as cdc.gov

• diabetes site:.gov

For more info, see Google Web Search Help Center or Search Watch Showdown's review of Google.

Finding Journal Articles

Journal articles often address info needs such as scope of a problem, populations affected, risk factors, etc. Google scholar will allow you to find out if journal articles have been published on your topic. Library databases also do this, but databases have more limits and allow more precise searching.

Google Scholar

Search citations to published articles, pre-prints, and more.

Pros:

• freely available online
• quick searching of scholarly publications as well as pre-prints across many disciplines
• when on campus you will see UNCG Journal Finder link next to some results

Cons:

• links may not lead to FT and results may not include all of the publication info that you need to find out if Jackson Library owns the item
• few search limits, date sorting doesn't work well
• few Advanced search features (using OR, nested searches, search history)
• very little info available on WHAT is being searched and HOW
• sometimes misses recent results

More info about Google Scholar is available from an article published in the Journal of the Medical Library Association.

To search Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/

1. Choose advanced search
2. Type your topic: diabetes obesity
3. Add publication year limits: 2000 to 2006
4. Info on understanding results
5. Hit the hyperlinked title to get to content that might be available online (the whole article, an abstract, or just publication information)
6. If a journal article, find the name of the journal and search Journal Finder (from a link in Google scholar or you can open Journal Finder from the library home page) by the journal name.

PubMed

Guide to articles published in biomedical and health journals and other publications from the early 1950s to present.

Pros:

• Freely available online, not a Jackson Library subscription
• Reliable, well documented source
• Good search limits
• Includes links to Search history, Details (to tell you how your terms were searched), and subject terms (so you can see the recommended terms for your topics)
• Includes full citations and often abstracts
• You can create a MyNCBI account to save searches, have new results emailed to you

Cons:

• Need to use the Journals Database (in PubMed sidebar) to find the full journal title to search in Journal Finder

To search PubMed:

1. Type your topic using AND between terms: diabetes AND obesity
2. Hit Limits tab to set limits, for instance past five years, English
3. In results, the Review tab shows only review articles
4. To find out more about a result, hit hyperlinked title then display citation

To find out if the library owns a journal article:

1. Find the full journal name! Copy the abbreviated journal title from the citation, open the Journals Database (PubMed sidebar), and paste the journal abbreviation to find the full title.
2. Open Journal Finder from the library home page and type the full journal name.

Some Resources for Funding Opportunities

• GrantSelect Search for funds from federal government agencies, foundations and other nonprofit organizations, corporations and corporate foundations, research institutes, state agencies, and universities
• grants.gov Search over 1000 grant programs offered by all U.S. Federal agencies
• Foundation Center Search by name or geography only for private and community grant offering organizations. To search by discipline such as public health, use the printed version in the library Reference Room at call number AS911 .A2F65.

Lea Leininger
Public Health Librarian