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Occupational Therapy

Research resources for Occupational Therapy students

Searching for Articles (Library Databases):

Databases provide you with access to a wide range of articles that can be used as resources for your paper. The following electronic resources (or databases) are the most appropriate places to start looking for articles. Please keep in mind that you may have to look in several databases to find all the information you need.

Effective Searching:

The words you used in searching are critical to achieving the best results:

  •  consider the many variations in words that may be used by authors for the same concept

                        For example: aged, elderly, older person, senior, geriatric

  •  Some databases account for these differences by having a ‘controlled vocabulary’ (a thesaurus) - they have made decisions as to which term (subject headings) will be used by the database when these different terms are used by authors in their articles.Medline has MeSH (Medical Subject Headings)
  • To Reduce your results: EXAMPLE: low back pain is too broad of a search. Try adding a population, an intervention or an outcome. Any combination of those aspects will increase the relevance and amount of your results.