MedQuest

Welcome to the Health Sciences Library. We are happy to provide an area for you to study and resources for you to use in your research. Should you have any questions or need any help, please do not hesitate to ask a librarian at the Information Desk or staff at the Circulation Desk.

Policies

Food and Drink

No eating is permitted in public areas of the library including study rooms, computer workstations, audiovisual or other electronic equipment areas. All food must be stored out of sight in closed containers.

Coffee, tea, water, pop, or other non-alcoholic beverages will be permitted in the library as long as they are in covered containers. Food is not permitted in the library.

Noise

This library is used for study by students, residents, physicians, and other hospital staff. We ask all library users to be mindful of others while in the library. Quiet Areas include all service areas, study rooms, general seating and study spaces.

Noise should be kept to a minimum. Any conversation should be kept brief, and at low or whispered levels. Those working in study rooms may converse at normal levels. Please also be advised that library staff may need to speak at elevated levels while teaching or while conversing with patrons at the Information and Circulation desks.

Electronic devices, sound, audio features, rigers and similar noises should be turned off while in the library.

Resources

Reference Resources Online

The Health Sciences Library provides numerous electronic resources including article indexes, image databases and electronic journals & books. Feel free to ask the librarians at the Information Desk for help in using any resource.

We recommend the following electronic resources for your project:

PubMed. Use PubMed to look for articles from medical journals. Keep in mind that many of the articles will be very specific and aimed at physicians. It will be useful to limit your findings to review articles, which give a general overview of a topic. To learn how to search PubMed, check out these Video Tutorials or ask a librarian.
CINAHL. Use CINAHL to look for articles from nursing journals. Aside from nursing articles and research, this is a good resource for consumer health information (which is much easier for non-health professionals to read). To learn how to search CINAHL, check out the CINAHL support page or ask a librarian.
MedlinePlus. This is an excellent consumer health information website. Here you will find information on diseases and conditions, drugs (prescription, non-prescription and herbal), current health news, surgical videos, etc. There is also a medical dictionary. Since this site is aimed at consumers, the medical jargon is kept to a minimum.
EMedicine. This is a free Internet site that provides detailed, reliable information about diseases and conditions. It is generally aimed at healthcare professionals and therefore, there is a lot of jargon. Still, you'll likely find it useful.

No doubt, you may wish to use the Internet as an information resource for your research. Keep in mind that even though there is a lot of good information on the Internet, there is a lot of unreliable information as well. If you choose to use information from a website, make sure that you evaluate it for relevancy and authority. Please see, How to evaluate Internet resources How to evaluate Internet resources.

It may also be useful to check out the National Library of Medicine's tutorial: Evaluating Internet Health Information. When in doubt, ask a librarian.

You are welcome to use any other online resource for your project. For help with narrowing down your search and developing an effective and efficient search, just ask.

Good luck, and enjoy your MedQuest experience.

June 22, 2010
Alison Farrell