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PH 292: Health & Social Behavior First-Year Seminar: Starting Your Literature Search

Welcome, from the Bioscience, Natural Resources & Public Health Library

Photo of dinosaur in lobby of Valley Life Sciences Building; click for library home page

guides.lib.berkeley.edu/publichealth/hsb1

Michael Sholinbeck (msholinb@library.berkeley.edu)

Here is an outline of today's session

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Starting the Library Research Process

What causes disease?

For any "disease" or condition, you could start by considering interactions among environmental and social factors:
Poor diet, resulting from individual food choices, "causes" nutritional deficiency or obesity in a population

But consider:

  • Is it "caused" by historical distribution of land use, including (in developing countries) during colonial times?
  • Or by the regulatory environment, including crop subsidies, food inspections, etc.?
  • What about the role of NGOs, IGOs, aid networks?
  • What about infrastructure, such as food distribution networks, transportation, etc.?
  • Is the status of women/girls a factor?
  • What about mental health issues?
  • What is the role of commercial activity, including advertising?
  • What about the healthcare and health insurance system?

Consider that how issues are framed is influenced by our assumptions and biases, and also, keep swimming upstream!

Is your topic researchable? 

You may need to broaden or narrow the focus of your topic. 
This may become more apparent as you search for and find information. It may prove difficult to find research on very narrow topics, or to cope with the vast literature on an un-focused, broad topic.

  1. "The harmful effects of domestic beer consumption among female students at Cal's Big Game"
  2. "Social factors contributing to binge drinking among college students in the United States"
  3. "Alcohol consumption by young adults" 

Questions, questions...

Below are some examples of questions or lines of inquiry.
Considering what question a research article addresses may help you determine if it's relevant to your needs:

  • Are their racial or ethnic disparities in type 1 diabetes mellitus prevalence?
  • Compare and contrast personal versus "upstream" factors relevant to these disparities.
  • Describe examples of things that could reduce these disparities, differentiating between personal and upstream factors. 
  • If a policy or program increases disparities, what are possible reasons for this? Differentiate between personal and systemic factors.
  • Describe a plan/program/policy to reduce these disparities.
  • Justify why systemic or upstream factors contribute more to these disparities than personal factors.

What is a good Research Question? It is a question that:

  • identifies a relevant issue in your field;
  • pursues relatively uncharted research territories to address the problem;
  • piques the interest of others.

This blog post has tips on how to write a good research question, including examples of bad, good, and great questions.

What is the question being addressed in the study you are reading? Compare:

  • "Our intervention worked toward fixing Problem X"
  • "The best intervention(s) for fixing Problem X is/are:..."

Finding a systematic review that addresses the question you are interested in can be very helpful

Structuring Your Search

It may be useful to have a structure to help guide you when searching. 

When you formulate a research question, consider these elements:

  • Phenomenon: What happened?
  • Subject or Population: Who did it?
  • Time: When did it happen?
  • Location: Where did it happen?
  • Cause or Motivation: Why did it happen?
  • Process: How did it happen?

Note: It is possible that not all of the above elements will be appropriate for your search topic.
Here is a handout (PDF) to help with this process.
This exercise (PDF) will take you through the process of formulating a search using this structure.

PICO is another popular way to structure a search.
PICO stands for Patient or Population; Intervention; Comparison or Control; Outcome.
Embase has a PICO Search option.

Let's talk about indexing!

Words matter!

  • Do you want articles on labor or articles on labor? Or is it labour?
  • Do you want articles on HIV (a virus) or articles on HIV diseases (such as AIDS)?
  • What's the difference between diet, food, food supply, food habits, food chain, nutritional status, eating, energy intake, ...?
  • Is lead a noun or a verb?

Indexing facilitates more precise search statements, especially for topics that are vague or ambiguous.

  • Using index terms also helps you avoid the need to think of every possible synonym or alternate spelling of your search terms.
  • Indexing means the citations in the database are assigned terms from a controlled vocabulary (Not all databases use a controlled vocabulary, however)
  • But be aware of the fact that indexing schemes are shaped by the cultural milieu from which they originate
  • Index terms are sometimes called descriptors or thesaurus terms; in PubMed they are called Medical Subject Headings, or MeSH