Collins Memorial Library: CONN 148 : Medical Narratives: Articles

Recommended Databases

SocINDEX
Offers comprehensive coverage of sociology, encompassing all sub-disciplines and closely related areas of study. These include abortion, criminology & criminal justice, demography, ethnic & racial studies, gender studies, marriage & family, political sociology, religion, rural & urban sociology, social development, social psychology, social structure, social work, socio-cultural anthropology, sociological history, sociological research, sociological theory, substance abuse & other addictions, violence and many others.
Sociology Database
Covers the international literature of sociology and social work, including culture and social structure, history and theory of sociology, social psychology, substance abuse and addiction and more.
PubMed
Bibliographic database that contains references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine. Records are indexed with NLM's Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). Coverage encompasses those areas of the life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering needed by health professionals and others engaged in basic research and clinical care, public health, health policy development, or related educational activities.
Google Scholar
Provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources including: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, patents, legal opinions and federal & state court opinions.

Try these strategies to become a better, more efficient searcher.

Build your search vocabulary -- keep a running list of key words, phrases, concepts, synonyms, and any related terms or ideas that you find.
Use advanced search features -- narrow your search with "AND," expand your search with "OR," or search in specified fields (i.e., author, title, publication, abstract).
Use search limits -- control the types of results you get (academic journals? language?) and how they are displayed (date? relevance?) so that you're finding sources that are most relevant to your assignment or project.
Try multiple searches and evaluate your results -- try to figure out why you got the results you did, and adjust your search until you get closer to results you can use.
Use database descriptors -- once you find an article that looks good, see what descriptors or "subject headings" were assigned to it in the database. You can use these to search only for articles that have the same descriptors attached.