Health, Nursing, Allied Health, Medicine

Best Bets (Top Resources)

Social Sciences, Public Health, History Of Medicine

Background Information

Systematic Reviews, Pre-Synthesized Evidence, Point-of-Care

Health Statistics and Data

Patient Information / Consumer Health

Alternative / Complementary Medicine

Rehabilitation

Health and Psychological Instruments

Health Streaming Video

Tools and Test Guides

Many searchers ask about the efficacy of using Web Scale Discovery (WSD) tools to search the health sciences literature.  You may have noticed that NYU promotes EDS (Ebsco Discovery Service) on our main databases page.

Should you use this tool?

• For most keyword searches in the health sciences, many thousands of hits are retrieved.  For a very obscure, very new, or very narrow topic, the results may be useful and manageable, as in the following examples:
  • Example: I am seeking an Author, Valeria Esquivel, 17 results on 12/2/2016.
  • Example: I am seeking an article with a known Title phrase: "hills are alive with the sound of music"  205 results on 12/2/2016.
  • Example: I know Kovner published about "novice nurses" in a scholarly journal in 2016. A search: Kovner novice nurses 2016 limited to scholarly journals= 28 hits on 12/2/2016.
     
• The EDS tool lacks the filtering functionality of CINAHL, Pubmed, PsycINFO and others (the ability to limit by study methodology, e.g., a clinical trial, an RCT or systematic review, etc.). So while a keyword search might often retrieve highly relevant hits on the first few pages of results, a comprehensive search of the evidence for a topic leaves the searcher wondering what might be buried or missing in the next thousands of results!
• The EDS tool does some mapping to standard vocabularies, but novice searchers often use one search term when they should consider synonyms. Specialized health sciences databases assist searchers to translate synonyms.
• No single search tool or database is comprehensive. While EDS promises to search among "more than 7 million+ scholarly journals, magazines, news & more," like googescholar or google it doesn't include every published source.  Always use several databases, and of course, ask a librarian for help.
• The best strategy is to go ahead and try it! But use this web-scale discovery tool as an adjunct to a more rigorous and tailored search in specialized recommended core databases linked here.

Once you have done some initial database searching, you will want to think about "filtering" your results to locate the best evidence.

Link to Filtering the Evidence

"Peer reviewed"  (or "refereed" journals) are those that subject content to a critical review by other experts in the field prior to accepting a manuscript for publication. Thus, limiting your literature search to the peer-reviewed journals ensures a higher level of scholarship and research methodology.  Magazines, trade journals, and newspapers tend to be "non-peer-reviewed," meaning perhaps just the editor or someone who is not an expert in the field has reviewed the content before publishing.  How do you know if a journal citation is from a peer-reviewed journal?

• You can do a journal title search in Ulrich's Global Serials Directory.  The symbol:   indicates a journal is "refereed"
• You can look for the "Limits" feature in many databases to narrow search results by publication type. 
   
• Limiting to "peer reviewed" and other publication types  in Proquest Central
• Limiting to "peer reviewed" OR "Research" in CINAHLPlus

Google Scholar is a time-saving, scholarly search interface accessible from within the Google interface. With Google Scholar, you can access peer-reviewed journal articles, books and book sections.  For literature searching, specialized databases have more functionality and access more comprehensive results, but Google Scholar is a good tool to use for a search for a known item.

You can configure Google Scholar to:

• Display a link to NYU options for the full-text of an article
• Export your citations to RefWorks or EndNote

Here's how to display NYU links:

1. Open scholar.google.com
2. Go to the left screen, 3 bars, "Settings" 
3. Click on menu item, "Library Links"
4. Type in: NYU
5. From the results, put a check mark next to "New York University Libraries-GetIt at NYU"
6. Click on Save to save preferences.

The next time you search scholar.google.com, the GetIt at NYU option will be available next to accessible article citations.

Here's how to change settings for Bibliography manager:

1. Open scholar.google.com
2. Go to the left screen, 3 bars, "Settings" 
3. In the Search Results, go to Bibliography Manager
4. Select Show Links  to import citation into: (your choice of bibliography manager, BibTex, Refworks, Endnote, etc.)
5. Click on Save to save preferences.