HE 251 Alissa Leavitt: Find Sources
Final Project Summary Paper
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Health Studies Research GuideProvides great background sources and additional links.
Introduction to the Library Website and Library Services
This 5:25 video provides an overview of the library website and highlights some of the Library's most popular collections and services.
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Welcome to the PCC Library WebsiteAre you new to the PCC Library Website? Visit this page for an overview of what you can do and find on the site, and how to get help when you need it.
Find Books, Articles, DVDs, and more
Article Databases
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Alt-HealthWatch This link opens in a new windowFull text for over 180 publications (many peer-reviewed) covering alternative and complementary medicine.
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Health and Medicine Resources (EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new windowSearch EBSCOhost's Alt HealthWatch, CINAHL Plus, MedicLatina, MEDLINE, and others (including Academic Search Premier and MasterFILE Premier) at the same time. Topics include consumer health information, nursing and allied health, pre-clinical sciences, aging, and more.
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Health and Wellness (Gale) This link opens in a new windowProvides access to medical reference materials. Includes nearly 400 health/medical journals, hundreds of pamphlets, over 700 health-related videos from partner Healthology, Inc., and articles from 2,200 general interest publications in addition to a broad collection of Gale reference titles.
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PsycINFO This link opens in a new windowStart here if you are looking for scholarly (peer-reviewed) psychology articles. PsycINFO is the single most comprehensive psychology article collection. Full-text articles from PsycARTICLES are included here. View the PsycINFO handout.
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ScienceDirect This link opens in a new windowFull text for more than 1,000 peer-reviewed life sciences, Health Science, physical sciences, and engineering journals with citation information for thousands more. Look for the "Full-text available" indicators to view articles online. View "How to Use Science Direct" .
Find Articles with EBSCO
Background / context / definitions / established knowledge
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Access Science This link opens in a new windowAn online version of McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology and McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms. It contains nearly 9,000 online encyclopedia articles, terms, images and videos related to sciences and technology. The Study Center provides essay topics, study guides and bibliographies.
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Encyclopedias for Background Research This link opens in a new windowA selection of online encyclopedias that provides general overviews of topics across many subjects. Start here to get working definitions of key concepts and a big picture view of your topic.
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Science DailyA news aggregator that tracks the latest research available on topics in the sciences and social sciences.
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Healthy People 2030Browse objectives to get ideas for topics for the Summary Paper.
Find Articles with Google Scholar
Before searching, be sure to set PCC as your library in your browser by:
- Visiting the link to set "Library Links" settings for Google Scholar,
- using the search box to search for "Portland Community College",
- checking the check box that appears underneath the search to select “Portland Community College – Find it @ PCC”,
- and then selecting the Save button.
This will ensure that when you search Google Scholar in your browser, you will see Find It @ PCC links to full text if we have the article (Google Scholar sometimes also provides links to other free sources for full text).
You can learn more about setting Google Scholar preferences on the PCC Library Website.
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Google Scholar This link opens in a new windowGoogle Scholar searches the web for scholarly articles, reports, books, and other materials. If using Google Scholar from a PCC campus, you can access full text articles. If PCC has access to an article, a "Find it @ PCC" link will appear to the right of the search result. Click “Find it @ PCC” to go to the library catalog where you will be offered a choice to view the article. From home, you will need to set your Google Scholar preferences to access PCC Library resources. See How to Search PCC Library on Google Scholar for directions on how to set your Google Scholar preferences at home.
Associations and Organizations
Advanced Google Searching
One of the best features of Google's Advanced Search is the ability to limit your search to the areas of the web where the information may be more reliable, such as education sites or government sites. The shortcut for this is to add site:edu or site:gov to your regular Google search. Plenty of .com and .org resources are reliable, like news organizations and think-tanks that produce research and data. Using site:edu or site:gov is particularly useful when your Google search results in a lot of links to websites that are trying to sell you something or that seem of low quality.
For example, if you conduct an ordinary Google search for nutritional supplements, most of your top results will be commercial (.com) sites trying to sell you vitamins. If you search for nutritional supplements site:gov , the top results (except for the sponsored ads) will be sites such as the National Institute of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, which are not trying to sell you a product.* If you search for nutritional supplements site:edu, your top results will be from universities providing research on nutritional supplements.
*Some government websites have experienced the removal of content by the Trump administration, including information about climate, environment, gender, diversity, gun violence and healthcare. Researchers are always advised to verify information by checking multiple sources. Contact a librarian for assistance evaluating content found on government or other websites and locating archived data.