Public Health

Articles, books, statistics, how to cite references, and more information about the multidisciplinary field of public health.

Is My Information Reliable?

Your professors, employers, and colleagues will always need to know

  • whether you used information that was scholarly and dependable, and
  • where you found your information

The Evaluating Information guide will show you how to evaluate the reliability of information.

The Citing guide will show you how to list those information sources correctly and completely, so that others can find them.

 

Here is another way to evaluate information: always apply the CRAAP test to web sites or documents whose trustworthiness you are not sure about:

  • currency
  • relevance
  • authority
  • accuracy
  • purpose

Search for Journal Articles, News, Conference Papers, and More

Save your time! Use these search techniques:
 

  • Put quotation marks around PHRASES (two or more words), so that the words are searched together
    --- Example: "machine learning"
     
  • Put an asterisk at the end of words, so that you get all of the word endings
    --- Example: high* = high, highs, higher, highest
     
  • Start by putting your search words in the Title. If you get nothing, you can take them out of TITLE and move them to ANYWHERE.

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 

Information about Other Subjects
 

1. Library home page --> Databases

2.  Click "Browse list of databases"

 

3. Choose a subject to see the databases with information about it.

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4. In each list, start with the databases under CORE -- they are the best and most relevant 

  • For a description about the database's topics, click "More Info" next to the database name
Medicine, Nursing, and Other Health Professions --> Go to this page for this additional information:


Who else is doing this kind of work? How many times has this article been cited?

Have you found a great article about your topic?

  • See who cited that article (that is, mentioned it in *their* article)
  • See how many times that article has been cited by other authors

If the author of your favorite article was cited by someone else, there is a good chance that the citing author (that is, the person who mentioned *your* article) is doing similar work. (Remember that newer articles will not have had time to be cited by other authors.)

Databases that tell you the citing authors, and how many times an article has been cited, are:

  1. Scopus -- (see screen shots below)
  2. Web of Science -- (see screen shots below)
  3. Google Scholar -- Under each item on the left, it gives the number of citations
    NOTE: Google Scholar's number will always be too high, because it adds additional things such as lecture notes and Powerpoint slides.


In Scopus: Do your search, change the Sort to "Cited by (highest)," and click the number under "Cited by" next to your article:

 

In Web of Science: Do your search using "Cited References":



On the results page, click on "Citing Articles" so that the little arrow points down (meaning "highest to lowest"), and then click on the number next to the article whose citing articles you want to see:

In addition to the news itself, news items can also provide the names of information sources about your topics.
For business news: the best database is ABI/INFORM, and the other two under CORE
  • Library home page --> Databases by Topic --> Business --> CORE
What are people saying?
  • Polling the Nations -- Questions and responses from more than 12,000 national, state, local, and special surveys, conducted by 700 polling organizations in the United States and 70 other countries, from 1986 through the present.
    (Only 4 people at a time can use this database.)
     
  • Roper iPoll -- "Most of the data are from the United States, but over 50 nations are represented. You can search for datasets by keyword, country, surveying agency, timeframe, and type of sample.
    --- Users "that have an email address with the extension @jhu.edu can self-register by clicking on the Account icon and selecting "Log In", although registration is no longer necessary to search or download when connected to the campus network. Pre-existing login credentials will not provide access to this new Roper iPoll, so you will have to create a new account.
     
  • PubMed -- In the top left of your results list, choose Article Types --> Customize --> [UNcheck anything that's checked] -->Editorial
     
  • General Science Full Text -- On the search page, scroll down to Article Type and choose Editorial, Letter to the Editor, or Opinion
Latin America
  • LILACS (Latin American and Caribbean Health Sciences Literature; English) -- This is a "comprehensive index of scientific and technical literature of Latin America and the Caribbean." Here is the list of countries which have contributed information.
         LILACS includes "systematic reviews, randomized controlled clinical trials, evidence synthesis, health technology evaluation studies, economic evaluation studies, clinical practice guidelines, technical reports, case reports and others."
     
  • Scielo (Scientific Electronic Library Online) -- Scielo was created in 1997 by BIREME in Brazil, which is a specialized center of PAHO/WHO. Scielo is "a model for cooperative electronic publishing of full text of scientific journals on the Internet to meet the scientific communication needs of developing countries, particularly Latin American and Caribbean countries. These journals are predominantly in Spanish and cover Engineering, Letters, Psychology, Health Sciences, and more." [description from CCNY database list]

    --- Filters on the left include Collectionb/Country, Journal, Language, Publication Years, and more. 

These are tools for coding your systematic review articles. For help, please contact Lori Rosman (410-614-1286, lrosman1@jhmi.edu).

Covidence

Rayaan (free) -- Scroll down for tutorial

RedCap (fee-based)

RevMan (used by Cochrane) -- This tool is really not for reviewing citations and creating data abstraction forms, but rather for use with your final product