Define your research topic. Spend time on it as it drives your research and your paper. In health sciences, your topic is typically a question. What is it that you want to know? State the problem or concern. For example, are people with diabetes at higher risk for respiratory tract infections? Be clear on your population. For example, are you concerned about children, teens, adults or the elderly? Determine what you are measuring. For example, you could measure risk of disease, or health knowledge, sleep quality, or the benefits of a medication. Here's an example question: Are middle-aged patients with type-2 diabetes at higher risk of respiratory tract infections than patients without type-2 diabetes?
Use a health focused database. Use a database such as PubMed which focuses on the biomedical sciences. PubMed only includes journal articles and a few books and conference papers. There are also specific databases for nursing, psychology, and other health disciplines. See the list of databases to the right.
Extrapolation is key. You will need to pull pieces of information from various articles to make your point. You may not – probably won’t – find one perfect article that sums up your position.
Take notes as you go. Record the databases you searched, the terms you used, and the citations you found. This will be helpful when you come back to your work and when you write up your paper. You can use software such as Mendeley or Zotero (see Citing Sources tab) to organize the citations that you find. Additionally, write down any questions that arise during your research; you can discuss these with your instructor or with us here at the library.
Stuck? Ask us! Call (573) 882-4153 or email AskLibrary@health.missouri.edu
Need a brief refresher on how to utilize some of the library resources? Visit the Tutorials & Guides page on the library webpage for screenshot and video guides.
The National Library of Medicine's free article search engine, containing article references from MEDLINE, PreMEDLINE, OLDMEDLINE, plus publisher-supplied and out-of-scope citations from science and chemistry journals.
Provides comprehensive coverage of the English language journal literature related to nursing and the allied health disciplines.
Database with abstracts and citations of research literature and quality web sources, including journals, conference proceedings, trade publications, abstracts, and patent records. A multidisciplinary resource covering materials from the humanities, sciences and social sciences. Also indexes EMBASE and allows you to locate the most highly cited items and the articles that cite them.
MEDLINE contains citations and abstracts to worldwide biomedical literature including research, clinical practice, administration, policy issues, and healthcare services.
Index of worldwide conference proceedings, with a list of papers presented at various meetings.
Contains references to articles in periodicals, technical reports, dissertations, and other materials in psychology and related behavioral and social sciences. Contains full-text articles from journals published by the American Psychological Association.
Full-text database covering sports and sports medicine journals. Subjects covered include biomechanics, drugs, exercise, kinesiology, movement science, nutrition, occupational health and therapy, physical fitness, physical therapy, rehabilitation, sports and exercise psychology, coaching and education and sports medicine.
Web of Science indexes thousands of scholarly journals, books, reports, conferences and more. Citation information and analysis with cited reference searching available. The collection includes Science Citation Index Expanded (1990-present), Social Sciences Citation Index Expanded (1990-present), Arts & Humanities Citation Index (1990-present), Conference Proceedings Citation Index (1990-present), Book Citation Index (2005-present), Current Chemical Reactions (1985-present) and Index Chemicus (1993-present).
