LibGuides: Occupational Therapy: The Research Process

Search Tools and Tutorials

The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is the National Library of Medicine’s controlled vocabulary thesaurus that gives uniformity and consistency to the indexing and cataloging of biomedical literature. It connects all the different ways to express a concept, such as "cancer."

Link to all MeSH Categories

Link to MeSH on Demand

CINAHL Headings
This tutorial demonstrates how to improve search results by using CINAHL Headings.
PubMed Tutorials
PubMed has a complete tutorial course on searching its database as well as brief tutorials on specific topics.

Use the CRAAP Test score card to evaluate your sources on a scale of a great source to use in your research to an unacceptable sources to use in your research.

*Score card courtesy of College of Charleston Libraries.

The Search Process

Boolean Searches or Combining Keywords

A Boolean search combines keywords with operators (AND, NOT, and OR) to produce more relevant results when you are searching.

Truncation and Wildcards

Some databases allow certain symbols to be used for searching multiple forms of a word. The "Help" section of each database will tell you if these symbols will work for searches in their databases.

Plurals--A plus sign (+) added to the end of a word instructs the database to search for singular and plural forms of a word. Example: holiday+ retrieves holiday or holidays

Truncation--An asterisk (*) added to the end of a root word instructs the database to search for all forms of a word. Example: house* retrieves house, houses, household, etc.

Wildcards--A wildcard is a symbol used to represent any character. The pound symbol (#) is often used as a wildcard. Example: wom#n retrieves woman women.

Evaluating Sources

The Hierarchy of Evidence is an evaluation tool that details the level of quality of sources you may encounter when performing research. Use the Hierarchy of Evidence pyramid as a guide when selecting sources to support your research.

*Images courtesy of Penn State University Libraries

For basic appraisal of sources, you can use the CRAAP Test evaluation tool. The CRAAP test evaluates resources based on their Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose.

*Image courtesy of UW-Stout University Libraries