Library Research Tips for Health Science 345: Current Health Issues research at CSUN

Librarian: Marcia Henry

Welcome, Health Science 345 .   You can email me at mhenry@csun.edu, reach me on AOL Instant messenger at marcia24017 or call me at 818.677.3012.

The goals of the library sessions are:

• Learn How to do Library and Internet research: determine information need, choose best resources, develop a search strategy, understand keyword and subject searching, how to use boolean operators and truncation  symbols, how to cite sources, and more.
• Learn how to use the Library Catalog and the CSUN List of Electronic Journals to find books and journals on your topic.  
• Learn how to use the Health Reference Center (Thomson Gale) -indexes popular and scholarly resources. Offers help on how to cite and when full text article is not available, the Find Text link helps you identify if CSUN owns the article in another database. In addition to the Health Reference Center, there are several other databases that allow you to identify additional scholarly articles on health topics
  • Academic Search Elite (EBSCOHost)
  • InfoTRAC PowerSearch (all Thomson Gale databases)
  • Wilson OmniFile Full Text Mega (Wilsonweb)
  • Proquest databases and newspapers
• Learn about PubMed, the largest index to the medical literature, CSUN's PubMed URL is: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?otool=cacsunlib
• Learn about CQ Researcher explores a single "hot" issue in the news in depth each week. Topics range from social and teen issues to environment, health, education, science and technology.
• Learn about Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center (Thomson Gale)| features viewpoint articles, topic overviews, full-text magazine, academic journal, and newspaper articles, primary source documents, statistics, images and podcasts, and links to Websites. Updated daily.
• MedlinePlus is a freely available internet website which offers good, authoritative, health information from the world's largest medical library, the National Library of Medicine. MedlinePlus has extensive information from the National Institutes of Health and other trusted sources on over 700 diseases and conditions. There are also lists of hospitals and physicians, a medical encyclopedia and a medical dictionary, health information in Spanish, extensive information on prescription and nonprescription drugs, health information from the media, and links to thousands of clinical trials. MedlinePlus is updated daily and can be bookmarked at the URL: http://www.medlineplus.gov. There is no advertising on this site, nor does MedlinePlus endorse any company or product.
• Do you need to know about legislation in California, the Official California Legislative Information is available at http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/
• need to find statistics on a health problem? when searching article databases keywords such as 'statistics' or 'epidemiology' or 'mortality' or 'morbidity' may retrieve articles that offer statistics. CSUN librarians have developed some websites that can help you also, such as:
  • Health Statistics at http://library.csun.edu/mhenry/bibhealthstats.html
  • Local Health Statistics and facts at http://library.csun.edu/mfinley/valley.html#health