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Public Health and Education - Former

A guide to search strategies and best practices for information sources relevant to the field of health promotion and education.

Search Techniques for Databases

Example Using Multiple Search Tricks

Limit to government and organizational sites (site:)

Example: "minority health" site:gov
Example: "access to healthcare" site:iowa.gov

Use quotes around a single word/phrase to force Google to include a word/phrase

Example: "iowa" "health literacy"
Example: "poverty" "race"

Use quotes around a phrase to keep next to each other

Example: "maternal mortality"

Add the word "statistics" to include it

Example: "poverty" "statistics"

Use minus sign (-) to exclude words

Example: "maternal mortality" -infant

Step-by-step Tutorials on How to Use Google

Advanced Research Techniques

Below are documents that show how to find more research using the "Snowball Technique" where you can locate older research (using bibliographies) and find more current research (using Cited By in Google Scholar).