Healthcare Studies

Brainstorming Keywords

Start by by thinking about the main ideas that are related to your topic.  The PICO format (Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome) can help you think about these concepts.

Consider using synonyms of your keywords to help find even more information. For example, if you are looking for articles about the benefits of exercise for patients with heart disease, you might start with the keywords and synonyms below:

Searching for Keywords

Creating a grid like the one above can also help you enter your keywords when you're searching in the databases.  

Try Boolean Operators...

• "Or" broadens your search results.  (Citrus OR Oranges OR Lemons OR Tangerines OR Grapefruit)
• "And" narrows your search results. (Rainfall AND Deforestation AND Brazil)
• "Not" narrows your search results. (Wound healing NOT Plants) (Social media NOT Facebook)
• "Not" can be used to weed out biased words or phrases associated with your topic. (immigrants NOT illegal aliens)
• Combine operators for more complex searching. (Coastal sage scrub AND fire OR Postfire OR Postburn)

Truncation...

• Broadens your search
• Enter the root of a word and put the truncation symbol at the end.
• The database will return results that include any ending of that root word. (teen* = teens, teenager, teenagers, teenaged.  environment* = environments, environmental, environmentalist)

Wildcards...

• Broadens your search.
• Use if a word can be spelled several different ways but has the same meaning.
• Wom*n = women, woman,  col*r = color, colour

Sometimes it can be challenging and confusing to tell the difference between scholarly, peer-reviewed articles and popular articles. I often tell students that if it 'looks boring and sounds boring' it is more than likely a scholarly article!

Once you see a few scholarly articles you will see that they share a look and feel that is very different than magazine articles you might be used to reading.

Scholarly Journals/Articles are:

• written to inform, report, or make available original research to the rest of the scholarly world
• written by and for scholars or researchers in a specific subject area or field
• always going to cite their sources as footnotes, endnotes, or reference lists (bibliographies) at the end of the article
• full of terminology, jargon, and language specific to the discipline. Readers are assumed to have a similar scholarly background
• oftentimes put through a strict review process by peers within the same discipline (peer-review)
• written with an abstract, a methodologies section, a conclusion, and references list

Popular Articles/Magazines are:

• written to entertain you
• usually short with catchy titles
• written by magazine staff or a free-lance writer
• written WITHOUT cited sources
• written in a language most everyone can understand
• full of photographs, illustrations, and graphics
• full of advertisement meant to entice readers

Here is an example of a scholarly article.

Here is an example of a popular journal/magazine article.

U.S. Government:

International: