Welcome to the Patient Safety Orientation Guide for Research - Library of the Health Science (LHS)
This guide introduces you to resources and services that LHS provides to advance your research success. This beginning guide and will be superseded by another guide as your course progresses. Activities are suggested to apply and practice your new knowledge immediately (see the final Apply Your Knowledge tab, which concludes the PSL assignment).
TAB 2: ORIENTATION TO THE LHS WEBSITE & 3 RESEARCH ACCOUNTS
There are exercises for your Assignment Document on this page.
- The "Library Resource Tutorial" and "Pointers on Navigating the LHS Website" boxes include brief tutorials aimed at raising your overall awareness of services and resources on the LHS website.
- The “3 Necessary Accounts for Research” box contains links to accounts that will aid your research
1) ILLIAD is the interlibrary loan service that helps you receive full-text articles when LHS does not own the full-text electronically.
2) MYNCBI is PubMed's online citation management system and much more. The guide links you to a variety of tutorials on MYNCBI on tab 3.
The "Find It @ UIC Button” information in this box explains how to access full-text articles electronically through the LHS holdings and through ILLIAD when needed.
3) Refworks is an online citation management database that allows you to collect all your citations online and easily integrate them in the process of writing your research paper or creating a bibliography through the Cite-n-Write document processor.
TAB 3: ORIENTATION TO CITATION DATABASES, PUBMED, MYNCBI
- The "Citation Records, Controlled Vocabulary, Subject Indexes" box introduces you to a few concepts pertinent to all research databases. The included tutorials are brief.
- The "PubMed Tutorials" box presents a number of brief tutorials on PubMed and MYNCBI features. Viewing these tutorials and practicing the skills they demonstrate will enable you to complete the application exercises in this guide's tab 6. These will put you on the path to becoming an effective and highly efficient researcher.
- The "MeSH - The Controlled Vocabulary of PubMed" box discusses controlled vocabulary in PubMed. This box links to online videos and tutorials that will deepen you understanding of MeSH.
TAB 4: MANAGING YOUR CITATIONS
- The “Managing Your Citations” box provides you with brief written instructions for performing basic citation management activities. This allows you to practice a few critical activities quickly. This tab’s contents supplement your learning from the previous tabs and serve as a quick reminder.
TAB 5: BOOLEAN OPERATORS, QUESTION TYPES, FILTERING A SIMPLE SEARCH, PICO, SPECIAL QUERIES, & OPTIMIZED SEARCHING
- The "What are Boolean Operations?" box presents brief videos explaining the operators AND OR NOT in search strings.
- The "Understanding Types of Questions and Answers" box describes the kinds of questions and answers researchers seek and introduces the classical PICO structure of a clinical question in medicine. Medical students are taught this structure as a way of organizing their thinking about information retrieval in the clinical context. Sometimes this structure needs to be modified in the realm of Patient Safety questions or others disciplinary contexts – but PICO offers a disciplined starting place for thinking through a research question and any needed modifications.
- The "Special Queries, Clinical Queries, and Optimizing Searches With Pre-determined Filters" box introduces you to the concept of pre-designed filters to control your search and limit results to only the highest quality evidence.
- The "Optimizing Your Search" box will quickly become relevant as your own research unfolds. Concepts in this section will be reviewed in your on-site LHS orientation.
TAB 6: APPLY YOUR KNOWLEDGE
- The boxes on this page present exercises for you to practice and apply your knowledge and skills. Most of the work for the Assignment Document is on this tab 6 and tab 2