Find Information - GH 68550 — Global Health Capstone Seminar (Beidinger) - Library Guides at University of Notre Dame

Finding Information

Decide on a Topic

An important first step in scholarly research is limiting the scope of your research by deciding on a topic. In order to find information, you have to know what you're really looking for. One or two words, like "public health" won't be helpful. This worksheet on Identifying Key Concepts will help you think about synonyms, broader and narrower terms, and terms to exclude.

Identify Key Concepts

You may also want to use the MeSH Database to explore and visualize relationships among terms.

MeSH Database
Published by the NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information), the MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) Database is the NLM-controlled vocabulary thesaurus used for indexing articles for PubMed.

For general results, you may begin with Google Scholar:

For more focused results, these are the most frequently used databses for researching global health:

PubMed This link opens in a new window
A free search engine with FindText access to ND's electronic journals. Searches MEDLINE, the National Library of Medicine's database of citations/abstracts in the fields of medicine, plus additional selected life sciences journals not in MEDLINE.
Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Accesses multidisciplinary databases of bibliographic information gathered from thousands of scholarly journals. The databases are indexed so you can search for specific articles by subject, author, journal, and/or author address. Because the information stored about each article includes the article's cited reference list (often called its bibliography), you can also search the databases for articles that cite a known author or work.

Search the literature

PubMed This link opens in a new window
A free search engine with FindText access to ND's electronic journals. Searches MEDLINE, the National Library of Medicine's database of citations/abstracts in the fields of medicine, plus additional selected life sciences journals not in MEDLINE.
Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Accesses multidisciplinary databases of bibliographic information gathered from thousands of scholarly journals. The databases are indexed so you can search for specific articles by subject, author, journal, and/or author address. Because the information stored about each article includes the article's cited reference list (often called its bibliography), you can also search the databases for articles that cite a known author or work.