HSMG 300 - Health Indicators - Public Policy - LibGuides at University of Baltimore

Finding Articles and Research on Health Topics

Databases of Health and Medical Articles

CINAHL Plus with Full Text
What you’ll find here: Full text for nursing and allied health journals indexed in CINAHL Plus. Also access to health care books, nursing dissertations, selected conference proceedings, standards of practice, audiovisuals, book chapters and more. Covers a wide range of topics including nursing, biomedicine, health sciences librarianship, alternative/complementary medicine, consumer health and 17 allied health disciplines.
How to search this database: Look at the EBSCOhost help page.
Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition
What you’ll find here: Health-related magazine, newspaper, and journal articles along with pamphlets and books. Other topics include professional health care and nutrition. Clinical Reference Systems and Stedman’s Medical Dictionary are part of the database. Includes 580 full-text journals and indexing/abstracts for more than 615 publications.
How to search this database: Look at the EBSCOhost help page.
MEDLINE
What you’ll find here: Journal articles dealing with life sciences and biomedicine. It is authoritative in that it is product of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
How to search this database: Look at the EBSCOhost help page.

Databases of general and related information

Ebsco Discovery Service (EDS)
What you’ll find here: EDS is our largest and most comprehensive database, with information from a large variety of sources and content in all disciplines. It covers materials contained in most of our other article databases, as well as books in the library catalog. If you don;t know where to start, this is the best choice.
How to search this database: Look at the EBSCOhost help page.
PsycINFO
What you’ll find here: Books, book chapters, dissertations, and journal articles focusing on behavioral and mental health. This database adds to PsycARTICLES with other media and journal articles outside the American Psychological Association's publishing circle.
How to search this database: Look at the EBSCOhost help page.

Google Scholar
Use "Cited by" feature and "Google Scholar Citations" public profile.
INSTRUCTIONS: http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/citations.html

Health Statistics

PolicyMap
What you’ll find here: a U.S. national data and mapping tool allowing users to create custom demographic maps, tables, and reports. Available data includes demographics, home sale statistics, health data, mortgage trends, school performance scores, labor data such as unemployment, and crime statistics, such as city crime rates. Use PolicyMap to create compelling maps of up to five layers, export trend charts with key benchmarks, download data for use in other tools, generate on-the-fly reports, and upload your own data to view it with ours.
How to search this database: Visit the PolicyMap Tutorial Page.
Check out this Video and Guide QuickStart Video and Guide

CDC: National Center for Health Statistics Vital Records
Use this resource to contact different state departments for vital records, which include: birth, death, marriage, or divorce certificates.
Kaiser Family Foundation: Global Health Policy
State Health Compare
Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System
CDC Wonder
Healthy People 2020
Kaiser Family Foundation: State Health Facts

News Sources

Baltimore Sun
What you’ll find here: Articles from Baltimore’s main daily newspaper from 1990 to the present. This is the best source for local coverage. For more current newspaper issues, see National Newspapers.
How to search this database: Look at the ProQuest help page.
New York Times (ProQuest database)
What you'll find here: Articles from recent issues of The New York Times, one of the most prominent and respected daily newspapers in the U.S. For full page views of older issues, see The New York Times [Historical] below.
How to search this database: Look at the ProQuest help page.
Wall Street Journal
What you'll find here: Articles from one of the most widely read and respected daily newspapers from 1984 to the present. Although its articles touch on a wide variety of topics, the paper's focus is on national and international economic news.
How to search this database: Look at the ProQuest help page.
Washington Post
What you'll find here: Articles from Washington, D.C.'s largest daily newspaper from 1996 to the present. Its coverage of the U.S. federal government also makes a good resource for national news. For older issues of The Washington Post, see The Washington Post [Historical] below.
How to search this database: Look at the ProQuest help page.
Nexis Uni
This database has replaced LexisNexis Academic, with the same access to: Magazine, newspaper, and journal articles and information on various people, businesses, and countries. It also contains federal and state codes and case law. It features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis®—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790—with an intuitive interface that offers quick discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.
How to search this database: Visit the Nexis Uni help page.
Google News

Finding Basics about Medical Conditions

Credo Reference
What you'll find here: Emphasis on subject encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases, and reference handbooks. Over 1,000 short reference videos, nearly 300,000 high-resolution art images, and thousands of additional images across all subject areas. Subject coverage is especially diverse and equipped to address all key disciplines.
How to search this database: Look at the Credo Video Tutorials help page.
Physicians' Desk Reference 2005 by Thomson PDR Staff
Call Number: Reference: RS75 .P5 2005
ISBN: 9781563634970
Publication Date: 2004-11-01
The Gale Encyclopedia of Public Health by Laurie J. Fundukian (Editor)
ISBN: 1410337677
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
The American heritage dictionary of medicine.
ISBN: 9781785395789
Key Concepts in Health Studies by Iain Crinson; Eilidh Duncan; Chris Yuill
ISBN: 1446249565
Publication Date: 2011-09-09

Searching Tips

Remember, most things in the medical field have two names: Common and Scientific. Think about which one will get the best search results based on where you are searching.

Try to make sure that when you search you have two key ideas. For instance, a drug and a specific population of patients.

Link key ideas with AND and like different keywords for the same idea with OR

Try lots of different strategies. Searching and finding information is a process, you need to try different combinations of keywords and look in a number of different places.

Don't be afraid to go outside of the library. The library is the easiest way to find peer reviewed articles in full text, but it's not the only source for reliable information. You may need government statistics, or reports from not profit organizations depending on how your search develops.