1
Introduction for Health & Science LIRN Library Resources for ACHS Students LIRN Databases We’ll Look At: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL) (good for topic overviews) Gale Health & Wellness Resource Center and Alternative Health Module Gale Health Reference Center Academic Gale Nursing & Allied Health Collection ProQuest Nursing & Allied Health DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) PUBMED
LIRN Tools We’ll Look At:
LIRNSearch LIRN Titles
Accessing LIRN Resources Accessing LIRN from ACHS. You can get to LIRN at www.lirn.net. Then choose Databases. I believe you can also get there from your school’s student portal. You will see databases listed by vendor. The first four databases we look at will be listed under Gale InfoTrac (click Display/Hide to see the full list). The fifth under ProQuest. The sixth and seventh will be listed under Internet Resources. Please contact your instructor or an administrator at ACHS if you need your school’s LIRN login.
Gale Virtual Reference Library(GVRL) Gale Virtual Reference Library is a collection of online reference books. This is a great place to start if you don’t know much about your topic and you want to get a good overview before your narrow your focus to journal articles. It might also be a place where you go if you’re reading an article and you don’t understand a concept and want a definition from a specialized reference source. First, I want to point out the subjects listed along the left side of the page. The main subject of interest to you will probably by Medicine and possibly Science. You can choose to browse through a certain category, limit your search to a certain category, or you can cast a wider net by searching across the entire GVRL collection. If you plan to go into business for yourself, you may also be interested in the subject Business.
2
Sample Search in GVRL: Let’s say I’m going to be doing a presentation to my class on CHRONIC FATIGUE SYNDROME. Before I read a lot of journal articles about research on the condition, it’s a good idea for me to search GVRL to get an overview of it. I’m going to click on the Subject MEDICINE. Then I’m going to use the search box next to the phrase “Search within Medicine” and type in CHRONIC FATIGUE SYNDROME and search. Before I choose an article, I’m going to look at the subject categories showing on the left and choose Alternative Medicine to limit my results further. You’ll see that the first result changes to an article on CHRONIC FATIGUE SYNDROME in The Gale Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine. You can read your article, download it as an mp3 you can listen to, translate it, view it as a pdf. You also have the options to print it or email it. Types of Journal Articles Broad Categories: Popular vs. Scholarly
Popular
Scholarly
SCHOLARLY or ACADEMIC JOURNAL ARTICLES are written for an academic audience. REFEREED or PEER-REVIEWED JOURNALS have a board of peers who must approve articles before they are published. Document Types to Look for in Research Databases: If instructors ask you to find articles in academic/scholarly publications, more than likely they want you to look at reports and case studies in these publications, not necessarily the short news items and book reviews.
When you’re narrowing results in databases, keep in mind these terms for document types: REPORT, CLINICAL REPORT, CASE STUDY, ARTICLE
3
Gale Health & Wellness Resource Center and Alternative Health Module LIRN has access to an Alternative Health Module as part of Gale Health & Wellness Resource Center. This database consists partly of reference sources where you can look up overview information about drugs, herbs, alternative health topics, and diseases and conditions and partly of a database where you can search for articles from a variety of publications. On the left, you can look up diseases and conditions in the Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine. You can search for overview information about drugs or herbal remedies. You can also search for those overviews by typing in a medical condition in order to find drugs and herbal remedies that are often used to treat it. Sample Searches Search in the drugs/herbal remedies box for BITTER ORANGE. (We actually searched for some drugs/herbs that you guys picked: digitalis, valerian . . . ) You’ll notice that the first result is a drug overview. Other results may mention the drug/herb somewhere in the article but not be exclusively focused on it. The fastest way to figure out where your term appears on the article is to click CTL F on your computer and enter the term. You will also see that Gale databases show the term you searched in red as you scroll through the article. Click HOME to return to the database’s opening page. Another part of Gale Health & Wellness Resource Center is the article search box on the right. You have a few search options here. If you wanted more, you could click on Advanced Search. Click on the Full Text check box so that you only find results with the full article. Try doing a search for the term REIKI as a subject (clicking on the choice for Subject instead of leaving it as a Keyword). You’ll see that the results are divided by tabs into articles from different types of publications. The first type to show are Books & Factsheets. These are usually good sources for overviews. Look under the tab called Magazines & Journals where there are 24 results. Let’s say your instructor asked you to find articles about reiki in academic journals and about scientific studies of the practice and its effectiveness. A lot of these results look too lightweight to meet those requirements so click on REVISE SEARCH.
4
That takes you back to your initial search. Check the box to limit to refereed publications and search again. This time you only get Magazine & Journal results and there were only seven. Now, these may all come from scholarly publications, but you can judge by their titles that only one may be the type of research study your instructor had in mind in this scenario, and that is “Reiki as a clinical intervention in oncology nursing practice.” You will develop an eye for distinguishing studies from book reviews and overview articles. Click on the article title. Looking at it, you see the findings of several studies mentioned and it seems like they’ve put together a summary of medical findings about reiki in a very methodical way. This is probably a type of research article called a literature review on reiki. Depending on what your instructor wants you to find, this may be a really good source. Notice that it was published in June of 2008. Just because this is all you found in this search, does not mean that’s all this database has on your topic. It’s good to try multiple search strategies. Click on Advanced Search to get more options. This time enter Reiki as a keyword instead of a subject. In the search blank below enter the term treatment. Instead of leaving the field your searching set as keyword, change it to full text to search for treatment anywhere in the text of articles. Leave full-text and refereed checked. You still need to go through these results pretty carefully if you are looking for studies. One thing that helps you tell if something is a research study is that after the article title it usually says (Report) in parentheses. One of these is the article we looked at earlier. Another compares the effects of sham reiki versus actual reiki on chemo patients. (SHOULD BE 6TH RESULT). Look at that one. Besides printing and emailing the article, I can also click on PDF View and see the article in a format more like the way it appeared when it came out in print in the journal. Sometimes that layout is helpful for reading. If you go to Advanced Search, you can limit your results to the Alternative Health Module. These results may or may not be academic journals, but they will have articles that can be helpful to alternative health professionals. Try doing a search in the alternative health module and only full-text with AROMATHERAPY and ANXIETY as keywords.
Gale Health & Wellness Resource Center Academic This has a similar basic and advanced search to the last database and it’s a terrific place to find journal articles, especially in refereed publications. One nice feature is the Subject Guide Search (look for it in some of the other Gale dbs as well). Let’s say you’re doing a presentation on
5
aromatherapy and you’ve read some overview articles in the reference ebooks in GVRL. Now you search it in Subject Guide Search in Health Reference Center Academic. Results are divided into subdivisions. Try clicking Usage to see a list of articles about different ways aromatherapy has been used as a treatment for a variety of conditions.
Gale Nursing & Allied Health Collection You have the same basic and advanced search options as in the other Gale databases. The same ways to limit results to full-text and peer-reviewed. Try going to Advanced Search to search for an article within a particular publication. Let’s say you read an article about holistic nutrition in the magazine Acupuncture Today and you wanted to find it and re-read it. On one of the Advanced Search blanks, change the field you’re searching to Publication Title and enter Acupuncture Today. In another, search holistic nutrition as a keyword. You’ll see that you get two results, the newest appears first. Click on it. You have similar tools to those in the other databases to email, print, see the pdf.
ProQuest Nursing & Alled Health Instead of Gale, this database comes from the company ProQuest so it searches a little differently and will include some different publications. Try clicking on Advanced Search. Let’s say you want to find information about the connection between neuropathy and nutrition. Enter each term in a different blank and change the fields you’re searching to subject headings. You will probably get 24 results. Look on the right at the options to limit the results and click limit to full-text, resulting in about 17 articles. There are several articles here that might be useful. Take a look at # 9 about vitamin D and diabetic neuropathy. This particular article is not in a scholarly publication, but it’s talking about a study that has been published in one so this might be useful to you in your research. Take a look at the related subjects on the right. You might make note of those and consider putting together a slightly different advanced search. Notice the blue toolbar across the top that gives you options to print, email, etc.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) This is where you can search for free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals, covering all subjects and many languages. From DOAJ: “We define open access
6
journals as journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access.” Try searching for topics here. You may want to look at the search options on the left and limit the language to English.
PUBMED PUBMED is Citation database for biomedical literature from MEDLINE. It is maintained by National Library of Medicine, one of the institutes of the National Institutes of Health. The National Library of Medicine is the world’s largest biomedical library. The simple way to do a search in PUBMED is to enter the most basic keywords that have to do with your topic in this main search blank. Try searching for CINNAMON and DIABETES (NO AND in the search). When you get your results, click on FREE FULL TEXT AVAILABLE on the left. You also have the option of limiting just to Clinical Trials as well as a few other options. Try clicking on one of your results. You’ll see that you get an abstract of the article. Then you see an image in the upper right that’s a links to access the full text of the article. If you have a smartphone or tablet, there are some good apps available for searching PUBMED on your device.
LIRNSearch Notice the LIRNSearch box at the top of the Gateway page. This lets you search across all of LIRN’s searchable resources. Try searching for a term of interest to you. You will notice that results take a few seconds to populate since you’re searching several databases at once. After you’ve done your search, you’ll notice under the search blank the links that say Search Options and Search Sources. On the right of the Search Options box, you can check boxes to limit your results to Full Text and Peer Review. You will need to click Go on your search to run it again with these options in effect. Note that these search options depend on accurate information from the database vendor. In the Search Sources box, you can limit your search just to certain databases. LIRNSearch gives you a way to pinpoint databases that will be useful for your topic. It’s a good idea to then go to the individual databases to do more searching since you have more options from within the database.
7
LIRNTitles On the site, www.lirn.net, go to the tab labeled Titles. This is a place where you can go to find out if any LIRN databases include articles from a publication you like. For example, try searching for New England Journal of Medicine. You can see that we have access to the title in three LIRN databases. You can click on the link to get to the publication page within the database. When you get there, you’ll see publication information and the option to view publications by date or search within the publication. Try searching for NUTRITION and take a look through your results. EMBARGO: When you see something indicating that there is an embargo on a publication for a certain time period, it means that the database vendor cannot provide the full-text of its articles until after that time period. If there is a three month embargo, you will not see the fulltext of articles for the most recent three months, but you can see the full text of articles prior to that.