Finding and evaluating information
R20–0726 BIOL60501 ASYNC ONLY
Introduction
This resource will help you to find, evaluate and utilise high quality information throughout your course and beyond. The resource works best if you keep a topic of interest in mind — some of the activities will ask you to apply a strategy to your topic.
We’ll use an example topic throughout to help provide context:
“Describe the clinical features of connective tissue disease and vasculitis in aged patients”
This resource will cover:
- Planning your search
- Using search tools
- Evaluating your sources
- Referencing with EndNote Online
Planning your search
What, where and how?
When you are searching for resources to support the points you make in your assignments it is important to consider the following three questions:
- What am I searching for?
- Where will I search for it?
- How am I going to search?
Spending some extra time thinking about the answers to these questions before you start searching will make your search more efficient and help you get to the most relevant information as quickly as possible.
What am I searching for?
The first step is to turn your topic or question into a set of terms to search for:
- Highlight the key concepts in your topic or research question
- Identify synonyms — are there any related concepts or other ways to express the same idea which need considering?
- Consider alternative spellings or word endings
Let’s take our example and apply this strategy. Identify the key ideas and ways other people might describe those ideas. You can be more general or specific. Please add your terms that you would search for to the Menti below and have a look at some of the responses — the bigger the word the more people have posted it.
“Describe the clinical features of connective tissue disease and vasculitis in aged patients”
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Apply this strategy to a topic you are working on. Our ‘Planning ahead’ online resource can help you to do this in more detail.
PLEASE EMBED PLANNING AHEAD HERE
Search frameworks
Search frameworks can help you to organise your concepts and search terms. I might use the ‘PICO’ framework with our example (potential synonyms in parentheses):
- Population — aged patients (geriatrics, older people, pensioners, etc.)
- Interest— connective tissue disease and vasculitis (rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma, granulomatosis with polyangiitis, Marfan syndrome, etc.)
- Comparison — other tissue disorders or no comparison
- Outcomes — clinical features?
The above is a lay-person’s attempt — I expect you to bring your subject expertise as well as ideas from reading the papers you find to your search strategy!
Work through our online resource with your own topic or question. Do any of the frameworks suit your topic? If so, try fitting your terms into one of the frameworks:
PLEASE EMBED — https://medium.com/specialist-library-support/using-frameworks-to-structure-your-search-6d2753eb801c
Using search tools
You have access to a wide range of information resources which will help you find high quality scholarly sources such as journal articles and e-books. We’ll start by looking at some of these tools before looking at how we can find non-scholarly sources such as government or NHS reports in a targeted way.
Library Search
PELASE EMBED FINDING INFORMATION 2–2.3 (LIBRARY SEARCH)
Google Scholar
PLEASE EMBED FINDING INFORMATION 3 (GOOGLE SCHOLAR)
Subject databases
PLEASE EMBED FINDING INFORMATION 1–1.8 (SUBJECT DATABASES)
NOTE FOR ELEARNING — PLEASE CHANGE THE EXAMPLE QUESTION IN 1.8 TO “Describe the clinical features of connective tissue disease and vasculitis in aged patients” THANKS!
Using health sciences databases can be a little tricky. Our ‘get started’ guides to the most popular database platforms will guide you through using these tools:
PLEASE EMBED:
Google Advanced Search
What is it?
Google Advanced Search allows you to search Google with more control. It provides more options for combining your search terms in an easy-to-use way.
Why should I use it?
You should use Google Advanced Search when you want to conduct a focused Google search without millions of results!
My favourite feature of Google Advanced Search is its ‘domain searching’. I can combine the term and phrase combinations with a particular domain to really focus my search. Returning to our example, I might want to find NHS guidance on workplace respiratory diseases. I would search for the terms ‘workplace’; ‘respiratory’; and ‘disease’ in the ‘all these words’ search box. For ‘site or domain’ I add ‘.nhs.uk’.
Another useful feature is the option to select ‘file type’. Selecting ‘Adobe Acrobat PDF (.pdf)’ here, when combined with the features mentioned above, often returns reports from the organisation.
How do I access Google Advanced Search?
You can access Google Advanced Search by going to Google and clicking ‘Settings’ in the bottom right corner. From the list select ‘Advanced search’.
For ease I usually just Google ‘Advanced Search’!
For ease I usually just Google ‘Advanced Search’!
Activity: use Google Advanced Search to find suitable sources for your assignment. What types of non-scholarly source might be useful for your assignment? These might be reports, news articles, press releases or anything else you won’t find in an academic journal. Identifying the organisations that might produce such sources can help you in your search.
Getting the most out of search tools
Finally we get to the ‘how’. Library Search and most subject databases offer an ‘advanced search’ function allowing us to combine our search terms (Google Advanced Search does too but in a slightly different way).
They use something called ‘Boolean operators’: the ‘OR’ and ‘AND’ that you can see on the search interface.
We use ‘OR’ to combine terms that are of a related concept. Using our example we might search for ‘air quality OR air pollution OR silica dust’. This returns results which feature any of those terms.
We use ‘AND’ to combine different concepts together. Using our example we might search for ‘air quality AND construction’. This returns results which feature both of those terms.
You can find out more about using these functions on our guide to advanced searching.
PLEASE EMBED SLS BOOLEAN: https://medium.com/specialist-library-support/advanced-search-making-use-of-boolean-operators-edcc0ab034c8
Evaluating your sources
PLEASE EMBED FINDING INFORMATION 3.1 (PODCAST AND SCRIPT — HOWEVER YOU WANT TO DO IT)
Referencing with EndNote Online
Before we look at using the reference management tool ‘EndNote Online’ it’s worth having a quick recap on using other people’s ideas in your own work.
PLEASE EMBED REFERENCING 1.2
Using reference management tools
Here at the Library we support EndNote Desktop, EndNote Online and Mendeley. All three tools do similar things but in slightly different ways. I tend to suggest EndNote Online for CPD students who may be working on their own personal device and a work device as only requires a Word plug in to be downloaded.
If you are doing a systematic review as part of your studies you might find that you need additional functionality. EndNote Desktop and Mendeley both provide this and which one you use is a matter of preference. You can find our guide to referencing and reference management tools on our website:
The best way to get started with any of these tools is to work through our guides:
EndNote Online:
EMBED: https://medium.com/specialist-library-support/getting-started-with-endnote-online-ec4acc50bda9
EndNote Desktop:
EMBED ENDNOTE https://medium.com/specialist-library-support/endnote-desktop-getting-started-e199b1f9e525
Mendeley:
Help and support
For help finding and evaluating information, searching databases and referencing you can get in touch in a number of ways:
- Use the ‘Ask a question’ tab at the right side of the page on any Subject Guide.
- Use Library Chat by going to the Library Website or MyManchester (log in required).
- Email us at uml.teachingandlearning@manchester.ac.uk
