Do you find yourself struggling to sift through endless search results for health and medical information? Say "No!" to that frustration.
This guide explains the differences between "consumer health information" and information geared to healthcare providers and scholars and links to your best bets for finding authoritative information for both audiences.
Use this to: access a broad, multidisciplinary research database for all academic needs.
Find: academic journals, news articles, professional and industry magazines, case studies, eBooks, market research reports, and more.
Great for: supporting scientific research papers, annotated bibliographies, exploratory essays, and argumentative or persuasive writing.
Use this to: search across a wide range of Gale databases at once, making it easier to explore content from multiple disciplines in a single search.
Find: academic journals, peer-reviewed articles, magazines, news stories, eBooks, reports, images, videos, and audio, drawn from across the comprehensive Gale collection.
Great for: conducting interdisciplinary research, getting broad overviews of complex topics, gathering diverse types of sources for assignments, efficiently exploring a wide range of subjects, or comparing perspectives across different publications.
Use this to: quickly search across most of the library's online resources, including databases, e-books, and physical books - all from one search box.
Find: a wide range of results, such as articles, books (physical and electronic), videos, reports, and more, that you can easily sort and filter by date, type of source, or topic.
Great for: getting started on almost any topic, finding varied source types in one place, or getting a general overview of library resources without searching individual databases.
Add Quotation Marks to search for an exact phrase or words in a specific or EXACT order. An exact phrase will return more accurate results because it snaps all of the words together, turning it into a phrase that must be found exactly in that order.
Example: chronic bronchitis vs. "chronic bronchitis"
Apply filters to limit your search results. Because they limit your results, filters might also be called limiters. The most common and helpful filters to limit your results are:
Create a list of keywords associated with your topic.
What else could it be called (synonyms)? What describes it specifically (hyponyms)? What is it related to broadly (hypernyms)?
Example: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a group of lung diseases that includes chronic bronchitis and emphysema.
Topics can be narrowed or broadened depending on the use of search terms.
General: COPD
Narrower: emphysema
Broader: lung disease