This interactive tutorial will walk you through the basic features of the Library Catalog.
The databases below are a good place to start your research for Health and Human Performance. Most of the databases have a medical or nursing focus and contain mainly scholarly articles.
MEDLINE provides authoritative medical information on medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, pre-clinical sciences, and much more. Created by the National Library of Medicine, MEDLINE uses MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) indexing with tree, tree hierarchy, subheadings and explosion capabilities to search citations from over 5,400 current biomedical journals.
The following databases contain systematic reviews (a type of literature review that collects all the studies on a selected topic that meet a certain criteria and synthesizes the findings) and clinical trials to provide evidence-based treatment information.
Evidence Based Practice means that health professionals pair the best evidence and research with their clinical expertise to recommend a treatment plan to their patient. To assist in making treatment decisions for a specific clinical problem, professionals need access to relevant and current research resources while also having the ability properly search for and synthesize/apply the information to the context of their patient's situation. The more focused you can make your research issue, the better more relevant your results will be and therefore, the better your treatment plan will be.
These heath and wellness databases may also contain information relevant to you research topic.
The following databases can provide a solid background of information on your topic. The databases listed include e-books which might contain a chapter or a whole book on your topic, or reference collections which are encyclopedias or other reference materials that contain generally accepted knowledge in the field.
You might want to consider looking at a Master's thesis or a dissertation on your topic to see what has been else has been written (and maybe not yet published in scholarly journals) about your topic or to find references to other relevant articles through the citations listed on the thesis or dissertation article.
The following databases are multidisplinary, meaning, you'll likely find something relating to your topic within these databases but it may not always be from the angle of your discipline or area of study. Use these if you're looking for general information, if your topic isn't super specialized within your field, or if multiple perspectives could benefit your research.
A multi-disciplinary database that provides full text for more than 4,600 journals, including approximately 3,900 peer-reviewed titles. Useful for nearly any research topic.
The following databases are interdisciplinary, meaning, one of these databases that on a different field of study may have overlapping research interests with Health and Wellness (ex. Psychology of Sports, Physical Education, etc.)
Millions of article citations, some with links to the complete article. To find complete articles, check the box for "Linked Full-Text" under Limit Results on the search page. Covers psychology and related disciplines including psychiatry, social work, pharmacology, medicine, law, and education.
Research databases contain mainly professional and scientific journals, the majority of which are peer-reviewed. Some databases may also contain newspapers, magazines, trade magazines, and other publications. Whether you're searching in the library catalog or in a research database from the library website, you'll often find a filter on the left or right sidebar to limit your results by publication type.
Most professional and scientific journals go through a rigorous editorial process called peer-review. Look at the slideshow below for hints and ways to identify whether your article has gone through that process:
The library catalog is one of the few places that labels resources as "peer reviewed" within the results. It's a clear way of identifying the type of source you're looking at within the results. View example article that's peer-reviewed.
In the library catalog and in research databases from the library website, you'll often see a sidebar filter to narrow your results by publication type. View an example search that applies a peer-review filter.
Look in the "About the Journal", "Editorial Process" or "Overview" page of the publication page to see whether the journal has a review process before publishing articles. Often times, if they go through the work of a peer-review process, they will want you to know about it and will speak to that process on one of those main pages. They will often talk about how they do a peer-review process (double blind, at least X number of reviewers, etc.). View an example overview page from Agronomy Journal.
