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UGS 302: Culture of Patient Safety - Young

Find Sources

1. Choose a Database

Single articles on a topic are found in our library databases.  The UT Libraries pay to have access to these databases and the articles they contain.

You can search in databases that are multidisciplinary or subject-specific.

  • Multidisciplinary databases contain articles on many topics/from many areas of study. A good place to start for a multidisciplinary search is the main search bar on the library homepage which searches lots of databases or Academic Search Complete.
  • Subject Specific databases contain articles from specific disciplines like Medicine, English, or Psychology. See your list of suggested databases below.  

2. Keywords

Searching databases is different than searching Google. Distil what you're looking for into a few key terms or phrases. Think of different ways to say those key terms, because different writers will refer to the same concept using different terms.

  1. One important key term is your health condition, you might search with this term or with that term and a social determinant of health (for this example, I'm using osteoarthritis and have found out that weight can be a cause). 
  2. For each main concept, brainstorm a few synonyms and related terms (broader or narrower) that get at that concept:

    • Key Concepts 

      		 Osteoarthritis Maybe social determinant

      Population of interest?

      Type of study
      Related Terms

      Arthritis

       

       

      ​

      Diet

      Food access

      Exercise

      You might not have a third term, but see some ideas above. 
  3. Combine key terms using AND and OR:​​
    • ​AND narrows your search by looking for articles with all of the words (your two or three key concepts should be connected with AND, because you need all of them represented in useful articles). 
    • OR broadens your search by looking for articles with any of the words (synonyms and related terms should be separated by OR - they get at the same key concepts, so any of them are useful).
  4. Try different combinations of your keywords to get better results as you search.

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What are databases?

This video, from RMIT University, explains what a database is...

Where's the Article?

If you don’t see a .pdf of the article you want, click FIND IT AT UT to find it in another database or in print in the Libraries.

If it is only in print in the Libraries or we don’t own the article, click GET A SCAN to have the article emailed to you. This option will take a few days.

Is it Peer Reviewed?

If you can't tell whether or not a journal is peer-reviewed, check Ulrichsweb.

  1. access the database
  2. type in the title of the journal
  3. peer-reviewed journals will have a referee jersey ("refereed" is another term for "peer-reviewed") - example below

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