Research tips to support UWA Population Health Honours students in their research topic literature review.

1. Population Health
Honours:
Researching the Literature
Lucia Ravi, Librarian
Medical & Dental Library

2. Honours: a whole new world, kind of…
Expanding upon your skills to problem solve, conduct research and
communicate that research to broader literature context and community.
You should consider from the beginning, how you will:
 Locate information – comprehensively and efficiently
 Manage your information
 Evaluate information
 Store information
 Use that information wisely in the correct context

3. As an Honours student you can…
 Borrow an unlimited number of print books
 Loan period to the end of semester (subject to recalls/renewals)
 Access Get It: inter-library loans and document delivery
www.library.uwa.edu.au/information-resources/get-it
 Utilise our postgraduate rooms (Med, Reid, Science)
• Map location in Barry J Marshall Library
• Map location in Medical and Dental Library
• Map location in Reid Library
Reminder: UniDrive allows you to access your UWA networked
storage drive from home.
www.library.uwa.edu.au/current-students/it-help/storage

4. Subject Headings & Synonyms
Breaking down your search:
Topic: Links between child health, obesity and urban design
concept 1 concept 2 concept 3
Key concepts Child health Obesity Urban design
Synonyms Child development Obese, overweight Urban planning
Environment
Urban design

5. Boolean searching techniques?
 OR to join similar concepts
 AND to join unique concepts
 “quotation marks” for phrase searching
 (brackets) for grouping and ordering
 * to truncate words, e.g. child* and children
 ? wild card, e.g urbani?ation
 Consider:
 What other keywords would an author use?
 Subject headings that might be used by the resource

6. Subject Headings & Synonyms
Breaking down your search:
Topic: Links between child health, obesity and urban design
concept 1 concept 2 concept 3
Key concepts Child health Obesity Urban design
Synonyms Child development Obese, overweight Urban planning
Environment
Search String: (“child health” OR “child development”)
AND (“urban design” OR “urban planning” OR
environment) AND obesity

7. Your Task
 Write up your focus research topic or interest
 Break this down to identify key concepts
 Identify synonyms for your key concepts
 Develop a search string strategy for your topic

9. Subject Headings & Synonyms
Breaking down your search:
Topic: Links between child health, obesity and urban design
concept 1 concept 2 concept 3
Key concepts Child health Obesity Urban design
Synonyms Child development Obese, overweight Urban planning
Environment
Urban design
OneSearch Public health Child Obesity Urbani?ation
City planning -
epidemiology
Index terms:
MeSH
Embase
Others…..

10. Your Task
 Sign in and try your search strategy in OneSearch
 Review results and identify other key words and
subject indexing terms
 Identify some of the core collections your results
are from.
 Save your search query and some of good results
to your e.shelf

11. A thorough search of the literature
Database Contents
AUSTHealth/Informit &
Health Collection
Australian biomedical literature, from 9 databases
Full text health research from Informit (Select Subject)
CINAHL Plus/Ebsco Nursing and allied health literature
Global Health/Ovid Public health, environmental & occupational health,
infectious diseases, nutrition
EMBASE/Ovid Broad biomedical and drug literature
MEDLINE/Ovid
PUBMED
Selected biomedical and health sciences
Broader biomedical and health sciences
PsycINFO/Ovid Psychological and behavioural sciences
Public Health/Proquest
Health & Medical Complete
Core public health literature, dissertations & news
Full text for up to 200 Medline titles
UWA Library

12. Complement your search using citations
Interesting
Article
(2010)
Citation
(2011)
Citation
(2013)
Citation
(2014)
Reference
(2003)
Reference
(2008)
Specialist Citation
Databases to try:

13. Use government and technical reports for
further information
 Australian Institute of Health and Welfare
 Australian Bureau of Statistics
 World Health Organization
 Google and Scholar
• try limiting your search to .org.au or .gov.au or
.edu.au domains using the Advanced Search

15. Use
Boolean &
Google
Operators
and
Google to
limit
searches
Search terms, then
site:org
site:edu
http://www.googleguide.com/u
sing_advanced_operators.html

16. UWA Subject Guide and Database Lists
Population Health –
UWA Subject Guide Link

17. Database specific searching

18. Database specific searching - Medline

19. Database specific searching - Medline
Join all
similar
terms with
OR

22. Keeping up-to-date
Set up alerts to notify you when new work in your
topic area is published.
 Search alerts
 Citation alerts
 Author alerts
 Table of contents alerts

24. Contact us:
 medref-lib@uwa.edu.au
 (08) 9346 7296
 Please make an appointment for longer queries
Karen Jones Vanessa Varis Lucia Ravi
Further Assistance