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Be efficient! Use the library's website and search within the academic research databases. These databases can save you hours of time and will ensure that what you find is high quality and appropriate for citing for your papers.
The top databases recommended for 1st year health students are:
When searching academic journal databases, It is important to enter search terms in a structured format. Here is a simple outline of the process of developing an efficient search strategy for the following sample research question:
How can we fight childhood obesity in schools?
Step 1. Isolation of main concepts of research question
"interventions," "childhood," "obesity" and "schools"
Step 2. Create a list of search terms. It is helpful to organize the search terms into a table format.
Search Term Table
| Concept 1 | Concept 2 | Concept 3 |
|---|---|---|
|
interventions health education health promotion |
childhood child adolescent |
obesity obese overweight |
Step 3. Use AND/OR and brackets ( ) to create a single search strategy
(interventions OR health education OR health promotion) AND (childhood OR child OR adolescent) AND (obesity OR obese OR overweight) AND (schools)
Search tips:
truncation (*): this allows you to search different versions of a word by placing an asterisk after the common letters (root word). ex. Searching child* will retrieve child, childhood, and children
phrase searching: placing quotation marks around one or more words allows you search them as a phrase, in the exact order you wrote them. ex. "health promotion"