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