PUBH 3331 Planning Community Health

When searching for literature for your Statement of Need, it is important to think about your health program in terms of concepts. Mapping out your concept well will enable you to search the databases with ease! 

A simple way to do this is to think about your Population, Exposure, and intended Outcome. This is called the PEO framework. For example, if I was proposing a grant for an intergenerational crafting series at my local library to reduce loneliness in older adults, I would write my PEO as: 

P: Older adults

E: Intergenerational crafting 

O: Reduced loneliness

You can download the concept mapping tool from the University of Arizona located at the bottom of this box, which is an excellent resource that will guide you through the process. 

Keyword Expansion

When searching in an academic database, it's important to think of synonyms for your key terms because different authors might use slightly different words or phrases to describe the same concept. By using a variety of synonyms, you increase your chances of finding all relevant articles. We can expand our PEO statement like this: 

P: Older adults, elders, aged 65+, retirees, seniors

E: Intergenerational crafting, intergenerational quilting, youth-senior art exchange, cross-generational art, age-inclusive art 

O: Reduced loneliness, decreased depression, community building, relationship

Notice that I'm using broad terms (relationship) as well as narrow terms (intergenerational quilting). The difference between a broad search and a narrow search is that a broad search includes general terms and will yield a larger number of results, which may be less specific. A narrow search, on the other hand, uses more specific or refined terms, often focusing on particular aspects of a topic, resulting in fewer but more relevant results. You can add or remove terms depending on the results you find. 

Many faculty and students use Google Scholar for their research. Be sure to sign-in with you Baylor University ID before you search so that you have full access to the numerous resources available to you through Baylor Libraries. You can do this by navigating to the setting menu and selecting "library links," then entering Baylor University. 

While Google Scholar is a great resource to use because it is not hidden behind a paywall, it is important to know both the pros and cons of the resources you are using to find information. 

Pros:

• Free
• Simple design
• Wide variety of materials available including grey literature and conference proceedings
• "Related article" feature 

Cons:

• advanced search options are limited
• filter options are limited (large search results are hard to avoid)
• material available is not comprehensive
• full-text items are often unavailable free of charge

You can navigate to the "Advanced Search" area of Google Scholar to enter your key concepts. It is important to note that Google Scholar is not a database, it is an advanced search engine. Compared to many databases,  the advanced search options on Google Scholar are limited and may not filter results in the most efficient way possible. For example, the search pictured below retrieved almost 700,000 results, many of which had nothing to do with my topic of interest. That being said, the results that were relevant were great starting points for me, and helped me to locate other relevant sources by consulting their citation sections and by using the "related article" feature.

Once your keywords are selected, you can move on to searching in the databases. A database is an interface that connects you to content from journals, newspapers, archives etc. To identify potential databases, travel to the Baylor Libraries databases page at https://libguides.baylor.edu/az.php and use the subjects pull down menu to see databases listed by particular field.

Ebsco can be a particularly useful platform to use since it allows you to search several databases at one time. In the databases list I can click on Academic Search Complete https://libguides.baylor.edu/az.php?a=a and be taken to the Ebsco platform. At the top you can click on “choose databases”. You will then see a list of all the databases the library subscribes to from Ebsco.  Some of the best databases for public health topics include: Medline, CINAHL, and APA PsycINFO. You should see all of those in this list, and you can select all of them at once for your search.