Allied Health

It is important to scan key journals in your subject area to keep up to date.

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

You must support your discussions and arguments with reliable, published sources. Personal opinions such as 'I believe...' are not sufficient on their own: you must back up your claims with credible evidence from academic literature.

This evidence is usually published as an academic journal article. These sources are typically found in academic databases and, in some cases, through platforms like Google Scholar. Using these resources ensures you access high-quality, relevant information. The Library provides these databases in collaboration with your lecturers and academic staff, helping you find the most appropriate materials for your subject area.

So it is important that you understand why you need to use these sources, develop your skills and knowledge of how research is published, and which resources are most applicable to your subject areas.

To search the literature in a comprehensive and structured way, you should use the databases that are relevant to your subject.

The links to the most relevant databases for health research are in the Journal Databases tab. You can find more help and support on using the databases effectively in the section in this guide.

Journal articles are papers that publish current evidence in academic or professional journals. They are published frequently and are written by experts in the field of research investigated. They have several functions:

• To share original research in the form of primary research articles;
• To review previously published primary research in the form of 'review' or 'secondary' research articles;
• To discuss theoretical concepts within a particular field of research.

Journal articles have some defining features:

• Generally focus on one specific topic or research area;
• Have a structured format, consisting of abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion and conclusions;
• Will include previously published research on that topic in the form of a literature review;
• High-quality articles will be peer-reviewed by other experts in that field prior to publication - given the 'gold star';
• Are published in academic journals.

Most journal articles are published in online databases, such as Medline, CINAHL, SCOPUS and Web of Science. There is more help and support about how to use these specialist resources in the 'Finding the Evidence' tab on this guide.

The databases in this list contain Health research and related research areas (such as Nursing and Social Care).

They index thousands of journal articles in these disciplines and may also link to the article full text. The descriptions below each database detail the coverage of that database.

It is a good idea to read these to see if that particular database is of use to your research.

For more help on creating an effective search strategy to use in the databases, see the 'Finding the Literature' section of this guide.

It may be that you need to widen your net to find more articles and evidence for your studies.

The databases in this list cover lots of different disciplines, not exclusive to health research, although many contain Health and Social Care content. They index thousands of journal articles and may also link to the full text. 

SCOPUS and Web of Science are also citation databases, which may help you to track down related research to your area of study.

For more information on citation searching (or pearl growing / snowballing as it may also be known), see the section 'Finding the Literature' in this guide.

The Management databases have content which includes managing in the Health sector, useful if you are looking at topics around staff development and management within and of the Health Service.

The market research databases will be useful to anyone studying Dietetics, for your product development assessments. 

In the course of searching these specialist resources, you may find articles that we do not have access to in our Library collection. If this happens, we can get the articles for you through our Document Supply Service.

This link is the information about how to use the Document Supply Service at Sheffield Hallam.

• Document Supply Service