Locating Articles with Databases
Most bibliographic databases do not recognize natural language. Meaning if you entered the follow question into the search feature, What's the weather in Peru today?, you would not retrieve the best results.
Because of this, we want to break down our research questions into CONCEPTS. And once you have identified the key CONCEPTS, you can identify KEYWORDS.
To help us with the first step, Identifying CONCEPTS, use the following framework (PICO):
| Explanation | ||
|---|---|---|
P |
Population or Place | What group are you researching? Citizens of a country? A specific culture? An age group? |
I |
Intervention or Issue of Concern | THE CAUSE. What is happening to your population group that you are interested in investigating? |
C |
Comparison |
Do you want to compare and contrast interventions or issues of concern? (NOTE: Mostly used when trying to find a new best practice or gold standard.) |
O |
Outcome(s) | What is THE EFFECT happening to your population group? |
Here's an example of how to use PICO to Identify CONCEPTS from a research question: What nutrition policies are used in Peru to prevent malnutrition?
- P: population of Peru
- I: Nutrition policies
- C: N/A
- O: Prevent malnutrition
Once we have our CONCEPTS, we can now run a search using the following KEYWORDS:
- P: Peru
- I: Nutrition policies
- C:
- O: Malnutrition
Use "AND", "OR", or "NOT" to connect the terms and build effective search strategies in the databases:
Rock Start Search Strategies- A search strategy based on a research question should have at least three (3) CONCEPTS.
- Bibliographic databases have filters (e.g. language, publication date, age of target population) to help narrow the number of search results.
Bibliographic Databases (Listed by Relevance)
- CAB Direct This link opens in a new windowProduced by CABI, this search includes CAB Abstracts and Global Health databases. CAB Abstracts is for agriculture, veterinary science, food science, environmental science, and nutrition. Global Health covers international public health with publications in various languages and publication types, including grey literature, journals, and conferences.
- PubAG This link opens in a new windowProduced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), National Agricultural Library (NAL) and contains full-text articles relevant to the agricultural sciences, along with citations to peer-reviewed journal articles. PubAg covers all of the core topics of the agricultural sciences including nutrition, food safety, animal and crop production, natural resources, sustainable agricultural systems, rural development, agricultural economic and policy issues, agricultural statistics, and education.
- AGRICOLA This link opens in a new windowA bibliographic database of agricultural literature created by the U.S. National Agricultural Library and its cooperators. Themes range widely across agriculture and allied disciplines.
- Environment Complete This link opens in a new windowAccess material related to environmental studies. Major fields include agriculture, ecosystem ecology, energy, geography, and more.
- Agricultural & Environmental Science Database This link opens in a new windowA multidisciplinary database for the environmental sciences. Includes scientific journals, conference proceedings, reports, monographs, books and government publications.
- PubMed This link opens in a new windowProduced by the National Library of Medicine, this biomedical database includes over 30 million citations and dates back to 1946.
- Web of Science This link opens in a new windowA collection of multidisciplinary citation databases, including Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, and more.
- Embase This link opens in a new windowAccess international biomedical literature from 1947 to the present, fully indexed.
- IRIS (World Health Organization) Institutional Repository for Information Sharing
- medRxiv's Nutrition Collection This website provides access to initial documents on nutrition studies that have yet to be written and submitted to a journal.
Tutorials for Using Databases
- PubMed Online TutorialWebsite provides tips and tricks on how to search for health science research on PubMed.
- Searching in Environment Complete and AgricolaThis website provides information on how to search for articles in databases supported by EBSCOhost. Since both Environment Complete and Agricola are supported by EBSCOhost, the same strategies can be used in both databases to yield results.
- CAB Digital Library HelpThis website lists various tutorials on how to effectively retrieve research from CAB Abstracts and Global Health.
- Searching Agricultural & Environmental ScienceThis website provides tips on how to find articles in Searching Agricultural & Environmental Science.
- Searching EmbaseThis webpage offers tips on how to search for articles in Embase.
- Web of Science Core Collection HelpThis website provides information on how to search for articles in Web of Science.