Rural Health : Literature, mapping and more

Starting your search effectively means taking some time before you start. Plan, practice, revise.

• What is your topic? Can you define it with a question? Think about what aspects of your main topic you are interested in.
• In order to decide which database to search you will want to think about what subject/category/health condition or problem it includes. Databases will have the publications that cover your subject of interest.
• Select the database to search based on the subjects it covers.
  • Are you looking for diseases or medical conditions? PubMed, which contains Medline, would be a good choice.
  • Are you looking for information related to medical recrords, telehealth or mobile health applications? Inspec (an engineering database) or Web of Science (broad coverage of sciences) are good places to start.
  • What about social determinants of health? These could show up in a variety of publications from economics to public health to environmental factors. Proquest has a Public Health database dedicated to it's interdisciplinary nature.

• When researching public health, PubMed is a great place to start. However, with 100s of databases to choose from you might find there is another one that contains articles from a specific disciplines that are not covered as well there.

Check out this page with multiple tutorials ranging from developing a research question to database search tips.

Deciding where to start your search is one of the first things to consider. Google and Google Scholar can find some useful content but there is much more contained within library subscription databases. Each may cover specific subjects and therefore publications that you may not find in others. Below are good databases to start with. Sources for datasets will be in a separate section.