Original research article vs. review article- what do these articles look like?
Critically Evaluate Information
Critically Evaluating Sources (what do we mean by "sources"?)
For college-level research, you'll want to consider using only the highest-quality information sources you can find. Between the internet and SU’s library, the “best” information can depend on the assignment. Here are some ways to determine the best information sources to lend support to your own research.
Database searching
- Academic Search Ultimate This link opens in a new window
Academic Search Ultimate offers access to an unprecedented collection of resources including journals, magazines, reports, books, and videos. Many are peer-reviewed and full-text. Subjects range from astronomy to zoology.
- CINAHL Plus with Full Text This link opens in a new windowCINAHL Plus® with Full Text is a comprehensive source of full text for nursing & allied health journals, providing full text for more than 770 journals indexed in CINAHL®. CINAHL Plus with Full Text is the definitive research tool for all areas of nursing and allied health literature.
- MEDLINE with Full Text This link opens in a new windowMEDLINE with Full Text provides the authoritative medical information on medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and pre-clinical sciences found on MEDLINE, plus the database provides full text for more than 1,470 journals indexed in MEDLINE.
- PubMed This link opens in a new windowThe National Library of Medicine's Medline database that provides abstracts and indexing for over 5,000 biomedical journals published in the U.S. and 70 foreign countries, and includes additional older citations and out of scope citations from Medline journals.
- ScienceDirect This link opens in a new windowScienceDirect's Freedom Collection includes extensive full-text journal coverage of the physical and biological sciences, as well as some coverage of the social sciences and humanities. For a LIMITED TIME, Elsevier is making all of their textbooks available at no charge, as well as 20,000 free articles.
- SPORTDiscus This link opens in a new windowcontains mostly full-text coverage for sports and sports medicine journals covering areas of fitness, health and sport studies.
- Web of Science This link opens in a new windowThe Web of Science Core Collection provides seamless access to the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, the Emerging Sources Citation Index, Science Citation Index Expanded, and the Social Sciences Citation Index. It enables users to search current and retrospective multidisciplinary information from thousands of the most prestigious, high impact research journals in the world. Web of Science also provides cited reference searching. With it, users can navigate forward, backward, and through the literature, searching all disciplines and time spans to uncover all the information relevant to their research. Users can also navigate to electronic full-text journal articles. Hosted content includes MEDLINE (back to 1950) and these regional collections: SciELO Citation Index, KCI-Korean Journal Database, and the Russian Science Citation Index.
Getting Full Text
Some databases will have the full text of the entire article available within the database, others will only have a citation for the article. When there is only a citation available, you will see a yellow find it button
(not in PubMed- PubMed is a freely available government-sponsored resource). This button will give you options for getting a full text version of the article. If we have access to it in another database it will be linked there.
If it says "Not Available Online" then look for "Check Availability in SU Catalog"; if you see that then we may have a hardcopy version on the shelf in the library.
If you don't have either of those options then you can request it through Interlibrary Loan (ILL). With ILL, the library finds the article you need AT NO EXTRA COST TO YOU. When we find it (usually within 1-3 days), you'll receive an email with access information.
Citation Linker
- Citation LinkerCan't get access to an article, journal, or book? Use the identifying information you do have to find the material with the Citation Linker.
What's the deal with PubMed?
PubMed is a great resource, in that it provides up-to-date information on all health-related research being published. That said, be aware that it is an index and not a full-text database. While some articles will be freely available via a full-text PDF link that says Free PMC Article (or something similar), many will not and you will need to seek them out using the CitationLinker tool.