GLST 271: Global Health (Laena Maunula)

EBSCO is a go-to library standard for academic articles. Organized in a suite of subject specific databases (or resources), academic articles provide scholarly research from peer-reviewed journals. EBSCO, along with JSTOR, stand out for academic articles from other websites for scholarship (even including Google Scholar) because of their careful selection of quality publications.

Academic articles in EBSCO are:

• peer-reviewed
• hand selected for quality
• indexed (which helps when searching)
• not available free on the open web

EBSCO is the go-to place for college level research after you have completed your background research in encyclopedias and academic books. Academic articles will focus on specific research questions and often times will be more narrow than your own paper. In careful consultation with your professor, academic articles are a key part of a college paper.

Subject Specific Databases are collections of academic articles separated by subject.

Academic Search Complete and CINAHL both contain many public health publications. To view the complete list of subject specific databases, select the A-Z List of Databases on the library homepage.

EBSCO, unlike most search interfaces, provides three search boxes. While one can search in one box as they would Google, utilizing the three boxes allows on to build a precise search.

What makes the additional search boxes helpful is the box with the word AND in it. When you click on this box it opens with three options.

• AND: Each result contains all search terms.
  • The search global health and internally displaced persons finds items that contain both global health and internally displaced persons.
• OR: Each result contains at least one search term.
  • The search global health or internally displaced persons finds items that contain either global health or items that contain internally displaced persons.
• NOT: Results do not contain the specified terms.
  • The search global health not internally displaced persons finds items that contain global health but do not contain internally displaced persons.

For example, this search would look for articles with the term global health; along with at least one of the terms internally displaced persons, or refugees; and not have the term DRC.