Health

It's really important in the Health and Social Care field to find good quality, up to date literature and evidence!

As it's so important to find the best evidence and literature for your topic, you will need to develop good research skills to enable you to do this. The resources in this section will help you to develop these skills: from constructing a 'comprehensive' research strategy, applying it to the different databases to find your research articles, to evaluating and using it in your work. 

• You can find the relevant databases in the 'Journal Databases' tab.
• You may also need to use evidence based resources to find information for your work. You can find these in the Evidence Based Research Resources Tab: https://libguides.shu.ac.uk/health/evidenceresources

Also in this section is:

• information and help on topics such as understanding research methodology
• critical appraisal tools
• glossaries of terms
• keeping a record of your research.

You can also find help and support for searching for the evidence and academic writing. Follow the links on the left hand side to navigate to each section.

Happy hunting!

Literature searching is a key skill for students on Health courses.

We know it can be daunting to remember all of the information you are told in the literature searching sessions and that you may need a little extra help.

If you are new to researching, particularly in Health and Social Care, you may question why you need to engage so much with research.

Well, it's important to keep up to date, both academically and professionally, and the best way to do that is to read the current research around your topic, area of interest or working environment!

This section begins with the basics of conducting research in the Health and Social Care fields. Our resource, 'How To Search', is a good place to begin, as it is easy to follow and has a lot of information about how to start out on your research journey:

• 'How To Search' - basic introduction to searching academic resources.

This interactive online resource can help you to find and use information for your academic work. Here you will find advice from the library for new students on how to find the right resources for your course work at university. You will also find links to advice from other services in the university to help you work and study. There are videos and interactive quizzes to help you check your understanding along the way.

To support you at all the stages of your research, we have a handy reading list of titles covering researching in this field, compiled by the Subject Librarians who support Heath Wellbeing and Life Sciences.

All of the books are available from Hallam Library and all are available in online formats. Most of these titles begin at the basics so it's a good idea to get yourself into a couple of them before you start!

• Reading List - Research and Study Skills for Nursing, Allied Health Professions and Social Work

There are also some useful videos introducing you to some of the key databases in this link:

• Getting started with databases.

You've become confident with the basics of constructing a literature search - congratulations!

Now you need to think about becoming more systematic and comprehensive in your searching of the resources. You'll find that you now need to begin refining your research to suit your own needs, and there are some useful tools within the databases to help you do this.

This video demonstrates how to apply your search strategy to a specific database (Medline) and then refine your search using the filters within the database:

• Searching Comprehensively and Effectively in a Health Database 

Remember! You can use these techniques in any of the specialist databases you need to use, and that these techniques are also transferable into any professional resources you need to use, too.

Using your own key terms, words and phrases is a good start to comprehensive literature searching, but databases are also programmed with their own preferred terms. These appear in the database thesaurus, and it is a good idea to check your keywords and phrases against the database headings. This short video shows you how to do this:

• Using CINAHL Headings

Another useful technique to use is Incremental and Citation Searching. More commonly known as 'Pearl Growing' or 'Snowballing' because you are using one piece of research as a building block to find other research related to, or attached to, that piece. It can be particularly useful if you are struggling to find research on your topic. This video shows you how to apply this technique using one of the multi-disciplinary databases, Scopus:

• Quick Wins: Growing Your Research Using Pearl Growing/Snowballing

This technique can also be used in Google Scholar (https://library.shu.ac.uk/googlescholar.html). Google Scholar is a final resort to ensure you have collected all the relevant literature for your topic!

Subject Librarian Support

This guide takes you through a step-by-step process of finding and selecting the evidence for your literature review in the science and health subjects.

The guide will help you:

• find information
• apply a structured approach to research
• help minimise missing key papers
• save time!

Divided into 12 steps, this guide will help you get the most out of doing your literature review, whether that is a stand-alone piece of work, as part of a wider project that involves writing a literature review as part of the process.

You can either follow the guide from beginning to end, or select the part of the process you want to know more about or upskill in. 

In the course of your studies, you may need to find other types of literature to help with your discussion or argument.

These resources are commonly referred to as 'grey literature' and can be found in a number of places. The term 'grey literature' normally refers to any resource which is not an academic publication, or from a commercial source.

For example, this could be policy documents, government reports, internal guidance, NICE guidelines, etc.

Grey literature can be useful for you to identify current research that is ongoing, but not yet formally published as an academic source. This article from the National Institutes of Health gives more detail about why it is useful to include grey literature in your research:

• https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jebm.12266

Searching for grey literature can be very hard and frustrating as it is not generally brought together in one consistent place, such as with academic literature in the databases. It very much depends on the 'type' of grey literature you will need to find. For example, if you were doing a service improvement, you may want to find internal documents, which will not be publicly available. So you would need to work out how best to find these documents.

There is some useful information on the NHS Knowledge and Library Services website about searching for grey literature here: 

• https://library.hee.nhs.uk/learning-academy/learning-zone/grey-literature

Here are some other sources of grey literature that you can use:

• Databases such as Web of Science, SCOPUS and ProQuest are good starting points for grey literature, as they contain preprints, conference papers, technical documents, and such. This link directs you to the appropriate databases for Health research: https://libguides.shu.ac.uk/health/journaldatabases#s-lg-box-14931495

• UK Health Security Agency has a list of grey literature sources compiled by Librarians to help with searching for grey literature: https://ukhsalibrary.koha-ptfs.co.uk/greylit/

• National Grey Literature Collection has moved to the King's Fund Library Database: https://koha.kingsfund.org.uk/. This is a work-in-progress. If you are searching for any content previously on the site, contact the Kings Fund library on library@kingsfund.org.uk.

• World Health Organization - providing leadership on global health matters, shaping the health research agenda, setting norms and standards, articulating evidence-based policy options, providing technical support to countries and monitoring and assessing health trends.

You can also use your professional body sites for your profession-specific evidence. And of course, there is also Google for anything that isn't academic articles!

It's really important when you begin your research to keep a record of where you found it.

After all, you may want to revisit it and if you don't know where you got it from, this will be difficult to do! Also, your tutors and peers may want to find your resource, too. Keeping a record of your search strategies is helpful, not only for this, but as evidence that your academic work is developed using good quality resources.

You may also need to replicate your research strategy as part of your assignment. Your assessment brief will give you more information about how to present this, if necessary. The best way to keep a record is to create a table where you can logically map your research strategy.

Here is an example of how your table could look:

You may also need to produce a PRISMA flowchart. This table detailing your research strategy and results will help you to do this. The following section contains information on how to produce a PRISMA flowchart if you are required to do this. Please check your assessment guide to see if this is a requirement of the module.

Critical Appraisal

There are many different critical appraisal tools you can use. Here are a few of the most commonly used:

There are others that you can use, for instance the Hawker method below:

You may also be given guidance by your tutors on which method to use. Check your module documents or ask your tutor!

Referencing Your Critical Appraisal Tool

When citing and referencing a critical appraisal tool, use the same format as for a website. For example: 

Critical Appraisal Skills Programme. (2020).  CASP Checklist*. Retrieved from: https://casp-uk.net/casp-tools-checklists/

*reference the checklist you have used, i.e. CASP Randomised Control Trial Checklist.