What you are looking for can make a difference in where you should look. Different types of sources offer different information.
Books:
Books take about a year to be published. They will not include the latest studies and research. Textbooks and encyclopedias are good for basic information. Further editions of books demonstrate that a source has been updated to reflect new information and may be a standard source in the field. Are there newer editions available?
Reference Books:
Reference books, such as encyclopedias and dictionaries, collect accepted facts from the established literature. In health and science, they can be huge and may take years to put together. Therefore, they do not contain the most current information, although they may mention studies that were recent at the the time of publication. But they are a good one-stop-shop to start by learning the basics of a topic.
Journals:
The latest research is published in journals. It can be difficult to find basic information in journals. Nowadays, most journals have a web site that allows viewing of the table of contents and summaries of articles.
Databases:
Databases are very useful and efficient for searching through journals. Sometimes they include books, and other sources. Every database follows different rules for searching and storage. Effective use depends on knowing those rules. Commercial medical and science databases commonly provide only summaries of articles and do not include full text. They can be very expensive.
“In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. (Don't laugh. That's the truth.) Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what--if this is right, if this law that we guessed is right--to see what it would imply. And then we compare those computation results to nature--or we say compare to experiment or experience--compare it directly with observation to see if it works.
If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong.
In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is – if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.That's all there is to it.”
Project Tuva presents science videos whose copyright is owned by Bill Gates, including the Messenger Lectures. This video is from Lecture 7: Seeking New Laws > Chapter 6: How to Look for New Laws. (16:47-18:33) Partial transcript
Feynman, Cornell 1964, “The Character of Physical Law”, Messenger Lectures, grabadas BBC
The Self-Correcting Nature of Science [Video file]. (2010). Healthy Learning. Retrieved January 29, 2017, from Academic Video Online: Premium.
"The Self-Correcting Nature of Science features the D.B. Dill Historical Lecture from the 2010 ACSM annual meeting. In a compelling fashion, the [video] reviews the self-correcting aspect of scientific inquiry and details how science has corrected misdirections and expunged errors over the years. In that regard, the [video] explores the ideas and insights of more than a dozen of the most renowned cultivators of scientific thought in the history of mankind."
To formulate a theory or a "guess" about the world, it helps to know what is known about the phenomenon. You can do this by observation but you can also find out what others observed or theorized about it. You can do this by finding out what they wrote or said about it.
Be careful searching the Internet for science information. You may retrieve journal articles but, as a student, you may not yet have the background and vocabulary to understand the contents. Don't despair. That will come. It just takes time. If it was easy, everybody would be doing it.
Science dictionaries, glossaries, and reference books are a helpful place to start. Some science websites may also provide an overview, but it can take time to learn to distinguish which are credible and which are incorrect.
Feel free to contact the science librarians for help. Some topics are more challenging to find information than others. Your topic may be one of those.
So how do you find out what is known about a topic?
Get an Overview of your Topic. Start with a specialized dictionary, encyclopedia, handbook, textbook, guide, or bibliography to get a brief overview of your topic. Use these to get competing theories, definitions of subject specific terms, an historical perspective, a chronology of events, or useful bibliographic references.
To search for specific print or electronic books owned by the ISU Library, we recommend the following:
Find a book about the topic to gather more information. Books are longer than encyclopedia entries and journal articles. They can tell you what is known about the topic in detail. They take about a year to be published so they will not include the latest information. That step will come next.
ISU LIBRARY CATALOG
If you live on or near the ISU campus, you may want to search the Classic Catalog and its collection of more than two million books, microforms, videos and journal titles.
A sample keyword search in the Library Classic Catalog would be:
eating disorders in the keyword anywhere field
AND
treatment? OR intervention in the keyword anywhere field
Look for journal articles for the latest research. Journal articles are more current than books. They are also shorter and often contain information about only a specific portion of a broad topic. Journals are very important to scholarly research.
The easiest way to find journal articles is to use the library databases. They have search engines that can be used to search for keywords, words in the title, author name, subject heading or other part of an article.
What kind of topic is it? This will affect your choice of appropriate sources to try.
| Care options |
CINAHL, Pre-CINAHL, Cochrane Library, Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition, Health Source: Consumer Edition, perhaps PsycINFO and Sociological Abstracts? |
| Drugs | Health Source: Consumer Edition, PDRhealth, Clinical Pharmacology, other pharmacology sources |
| Medical treatments | MEDLINE, Cochrane Library, other medical databases |
| Nursing administration | Health Business FullTEXT, other business databases |
| Nursing education | ERIC, other education databases |
| Patient attitudes or other psychological states | PsycINFO, Sociological Abstracts, other psychology or sociology databases |
Some sources may be more appropriate than others for these topics. If appropriate, don’t forget to check out the Business, Education, Psychology, or Sociology databases.
To find the most commonly used databases in a subject,
The Internet contains a wealth of information but can result in "information overload," if you encounter too much information to digest. And, because anyone can create a Web page, you also may encounter incorrect or misleading information. therefore, it is very important to evaluate your sources.
Use search engines to search the Internet.
Other resources may also be appropriate.
Newspapers - Newspapers can tell you what the general public knows about a topic. They also will occasionally report new or interesting health information. "Researchers at Indiana State University published a report in the American Journal of Nursing that found..." You can track down the original article yourself given clues from the newspaper article. Does it say who the researchers are? They probably authored the paper. Does it say what institution is doing the research? Does it mention what publication published the original research? You can use our library resources to search for that author, institution, and publication.
