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HIP202 Research Skills Guide: Start

Introduction

 

Welcome to the HIP202 Research Skills Guide.

This guide is to help you search the Allied Health literature for published studies relevant to health practice. It will help you with Assessment Item One – Ask & Acquire Examples - and the e-exam. It builds on the HIP101 Research Skills Guide.

The focus of searching is on CINAHL Plus with Full Text. CINAHL is a reputable and health-specific resource which, because of its allied health focus, scholarly content, and sophisticated search functions, should always give much better results than general Internet searching. We also look at some publicly available resources: Google Scholar, PubMed, and three discipline-specific databases.

You can work through this guide at your own pace, or dip into it as needed using the navigation structure (tabs and boxes), or the Next and Previous page links.

If you need further help, please contact the Library, as in the box at right.

Finally, if you wish to test yourself on your knowledge of databases searching, there is an optional test in the HIP202 subject site. Look for the 'Test Yourself' on Database Searching in the left menu. There are ten multiple-choice questions.

Wishing you all the best in HIP202
Charles Sturt Library

Refresher - The HIP101 Research Skills Guide

As a first-year School of Community Health student, you might have worked through the online HIP101 Research Skills Guide.

This guide helps first year students identify and find resources, covering resource types, citation types, Primo Search, databases, and Peer Review.

See HIP101 Research Skills Guide for a refresher.

Refresher - Primo Search

Hopefully in 1st Year you got used to searching in Primo Search, for known items and for material on a topic.

Primo Search is a search tool where you can search across most of the Library's resources in the same search. You can easily search for known readings/resources, and you can also search for information on a topic.

As an example, to find information on cardiac disease in Australia, you could search for  ... "cardiac disease" australia* .  Primo Search will run this search as "cardiac disease" [AND] australia* :

There will be lots of results, but the idea of Primo Search is to use the Refine my results panel on the left of screen. You can refine by many different criteria, including:

  • Peer-reviewed Journals
  • Resource type
  • Dates
  • Topics.

Tip: For a quick way to get fewer, and more relevant, results, go to Advanced Search and change Any field to Title or Subject. This will search for your term(s) only where they appear in the title, or in a subject heading.

In Primo Search Advanced Search you can change from searching "Anywhere in the record" to in the title"

Help from a librarian

 

  • Or use the HIP202 Ask a Librarian forum (in the subject site).

eBook chapter - Finding the evidence

In your Learning Content > Week 3 Acquiring evidence instructions, there is a book chapter recommended as further reading. The book chapter is now available in eBook format:

Booth, A. (2017). Finding the evidence. In T. Hoffman, S. Bennett, & C. Del Mar (Eds.), Evidence-based practice across the health professions (3rd ed., pp. 41-63). Elsevier Australia.

You can also access the entire eBook:

Hoffman, T., Bennett, S., & Del Mar, C. (Eds). (2017).  Evidence-based practice across the health professions (3rd ed.). Elsevier Australia.

Note: you have to register to access content in this particular eBook collection.

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