Research Guides: Health Sciences Research: Information Research Process

Introduction

The information research process, or inquiry process, presented here is applicable in education and practice, whether conducting a literature review for an assignment or making evidence-based health care decisions.

From University of Calgary, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.

Background Reading

Background reading can help you get a sense of the scholarly conversation surrounding a particular topic. Sources of background information may include book content, review articles, or topic overviews provided in point of care tools, etc.

Where to find background information:

Omni
Omni is the library discovery tool that gives you access to high-quality resources including books, e-books, scholarly journals, newspaper articles, theses and dissertations, and conference proceedings.

Google Scholar
Free access

Use the Google search engine to locate articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles published on the "open" web.
Should you encounter a captcha problem, you can still search QUL resources by going to https://scholar.google.com following the instructions here.

Point of care tools
Point of care tools (i.e. clinical tools) can also be useful for getting started as they provide a complete overview of various conditions.

Tip for searching the Omni and Google Scholar: only scan through the top results since they are sorted and displayed by relevance. If you are not getting the type of information you expect, try again with different search terms. Try applying the limits available to narrow your search results (by publication date for example).