Finding information
R21–0892 MSc. Healthcare Management
SYNC session
Slides https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/learning-objects/mle/resources/embedded/0892-presentation.pptx
Introduction to today’s session
- Getting started or exploring a topic
- Taking a systematic approach
- Non-scholarly information
Start with your topic or question
Take some time to think about your question and the information you need to help you answer it. Scholarly research publications; case studies; news articles; theories of reflective practice; data and statistics — and potentially anything else that can help you to support the points you are making.
Think about the range of perspectives that you might bring together to evidence and support your arguments. Who might have an opinion on your topic? Which scholarly disciplines, professionals or organisations?
Planning your search
Once you have identified what you are looking for you can identify where to find it. Our ‘Planning and reviewing your search’ resource can help you through this process.
Getting started or just exploring
Here we will look at tools to help you to find scholarly research and the different ways you might do this. When starting with your topic you might just want to quickly explore what has been written.
When you want to explore a topic or check whether there is evidence to support a point, you might want to do a “quick and dirty” scoping search.
Experiment with terms and make changes as you go.
DEMONSTRATIONS
Highlight the auto-complete and ease with which you can try out different search terms.
Highlight the limiters available and how this can help you to find the type of information you are looking for — for example, you might limit ‘resource type’ to ‘books’ if you were looking for a good definition to use in an introduction.
Highlight how you can iteratively make you search more focussed, and that this subject-specific database only returns scholarly research published in business and management journals.
Systematic approach
There are other occasions where you want to gather as much information as you can on a topic at the start. Here, taking a more systematic approach is more appropriate.
When you want to gather as much information as possible on a given topic such as when conducting a literature review or identifying gaps in the research.
Take time to think about search terms and how you combine them, record what you have done.
Activity
- What are the key terms, ideas and concepts in this topic?
- Add your thoughts in the chat.
“Bridging the gap between senior leadership and geographically dispersed teams in a healthcare setting”
Activity
What synonyms and related concepts could we search for when looking at:
- bridging the gap
- senior leadership
- geographically dispersed teams
- healthcare setting
Add your thoughts to the chat.
Combining your terms
Use OR to combine terms that are synonyms or related concepts:
Bridging the gap OR communication OR chain of command
Use AND to combine different concepts
(Bridging the gap OR communication OR chain of command) AND (Senior leadership OR executive OR leadership team)
DEMONSTRATIONS
Conduct a more complex search using the example.
The same as Business Source Premier and mention that you can find unique results in each.
Use Ovid Medline to highlight the importance of different perspectives — here we might find management articles written by health scientists and published in health sciences journals.
Grey literature/non-scholarly sources
When you recognise that other perspectives might compliment the scholarly evidence you have found.
Could include news sources from journalists, guidelines or reports from organisations.
Think carefully about how you use these sources. Consider who produced it and why/how reliable the source is.
DEMONSTRATIONS
Great for searching for the same ideas from multiple organisations — keep the search terms the same and change the searched domain.
Great for finding information from multiple news sources.
Show the range of statistical data available.
