Research Guides: Translational Medicine: Information Research Process

Introduction

The information research process, or inquiry process, presented here may be a standalone process (e.g., for writing a course paper, or conducting a literature review), or it might be part of a broader research and writing process (e.g., to plan original research).

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 clinical/"point of care" tools, etc.

Where to find background information:

Omni
Omni is the library discovery tool that gives you access to high-quality sources including book content, scholarly journal articles, and more.
eBook collections
eBook collections such as AccessMedicine and Thieme MedOne Education each contain around 100 textbook titles and allow readers to browse titles by specialty/subject, or conduct keyword searching to retrieve book sections/chapters that discuss a topic of interest.
Google Scholar
Use Google Scholar 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.
Clinical tools
Clinical tools (i.e., point of care 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).