Connect with your public health librarian to ask questions about scholarly publishing, literature reviews, citation management, critical appraisal, or anything else library-related.
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Evidence-Based Public Health
How do librarians support the evidence-based public health process?
Adapted from “Evidence-based public health: a fundamental concept for public health practice”
- *Community assessment – Librarians help you find data about community strengths and needs
- Identify the issue
- *Search the literature – Librarians help you find and appraise relevant literature
- Develop and implement the intervention
- *Evaluate the information – Librarians help you write up and disseminate your findings
Search for Literature & Data
FIND
Research Questions & Search Strategies
- Develop a research question that has a population, intervention/exposure, and outcome in mind (PIO or PEO framework)
- Identify search terms that would help you retrieve literature on all PIO/PEO aspects of your topic.
- Search strategies to consider
- Building blocks – create individual search lines for each PIO/PEO concept, use different field tags for different lines, and/or make a concept table
- Pearl growing – begin with a relevant document and use the characteristics to grow a set of related documents. (Try it in Scopus by exploring “Related Documents”)
- Citation chaining – find a relevant article and mine its reference list. (Try it in Web of Science by exploring “Citation Network”)
- Simple strategy – select a database, divide question into parts/concepts, and compose a single query using terms for each concept linked by Boolean operators (AND/OR)
- Modify your search as needed based on the results
- Controlled vocabulary – use controlled vocabulary search terms to retrieve documents about a topic, without depending on the authors’ choice of terminology
Where to Start
Different databases have different controlled vocabularies, functionality, literature types, and more. Set up a consultation and we’ll make searching recommendations based on your research topic, goals, and preferences.
Finding data – visit the medical library’s Research Data site for health data resources
Scholarly literature – written by researchers; undergoes a thorough publication process usually involving peer-review. Core resources for public health and biomedical literature:
- PubMed
- Ovid: Global Health
- Embase
- Scopus
- Web of Science
- Google Scholar
- Articles+ (through Yale’s Quicksearch)
Grey literature – information produced at all levels of government, academia, business, and industry; publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body
- The Community Guide – evidence-based findings for population health, funded by the CDC, with infographics and analyses of interventions on a variety of public health topics.
- Healthy People 2030 – comprehensive set of national goals and objectives for improving the health of Americans.
- Industry Documents – documents related to public health and made public through lawsuits, including smoking, diet (especially sugar), drugs, chemicals, and fossil fuels.
- Policy Commons – community platform for research from policy experts, nonpartisan think tanks, IGOs and NGOs.
SAVE
Citation Managers
Citation managers allow you to:
- Organize your readings in one place
- Access readings offline
- Find full-text articles
- Avoid redoing a search
- Cite sources in your preferred citation style and auto-format a reference list
READ & ANNOTATE
Knowing how to read, evaluate, and synthesize scholarly literature is a skill which you can develop with help from the Medical Library!
Annotation
- Annotated bibliographies help you to remember what you have read, expose similarities, differences, and gaps in the literature, and are building blocks for the literature review paper/manuscript
- Matrix note-taking focuses on key areas of a source document while taking notes in an Excel spreadsheet or Word document.
Critical appraisal
Your “matrix” or notes can include your summary of the findings and also your evaluation of the document’s quality. Use JBI checklists to decide whether a given paper is trustworthy.
Synthesize
Write a synthesis that includes both the content and the critical analysis of these materials. See ‘WRITE’ section for more.
WRITE & PUBLISH
Consult with experts of the Graduate Writing Lab at the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning for all of your writing needs. Writing Lab tutors are available for 1:1 consultations.
Find reporting guidelines on the Equator Network
You can connect with a public health librarian to ask questions about scholarly publishing, open access, copyright, journal impact factor, article-level metrics, and more! Please see a full listing of Library memberships with publishers and support for openness initiatives here: Open Access: Library Support, which means discounts and waivers on publishing costs for Yale authors.
Public Health & Policy News Sources
- KFF Health News
- MindSite News
- Public Health Watch
- The Examination
- Global Health Now
- The Sick Times
- ProPublica
- Your Local Epidemiologist
- Tradeoffs (podcast)
- Death Panel (podcast)
View a list of news subscriptions provided by Yale Library (including New York Times, STAT+, and Washington Post)
FAQs
Where can I find articles and books?
Refer to the Yale Library Online YouTube Channel videos 5 & 9 to learn how to use Yale’s QuickSearch to find books and articles.
Do I have access to the New York Times through Yale?
You can read the New York Times AND other subscription news sources for free through Yale University Library.
Why should I download a citation manager?
A citation manager allows you to save sources to a central location, immediately access full-text articles, and create formatted citations in your preferred style (APA, JAMA, and countless others). We recommend two citation softwares: EndNote and Zotero.
How can I come up with a strong research question?
Think about your research question with the PIO or PEO framework in mind. PIO stands for population, intervention, and outcome – and in the ‘E’ variation, ‘E’ means ‘exposure.’
What are narrative reviews, systematic reviews, and other review types?
Review types depend on the degree of search comprehensiveness, whether there’s a formal quality assessment of the study’s design, and the type of analysis done (qualitative vs. quantitative). Timeline and team size also matter when deciding on what review type path to take. Learn more about evidence synthesis and types of reviews.
What projects have PH students worked on in the past?
Read past public health student theses in EliScholar
Can you help with my internship?
If one of your internship deliverables is a literature review for your host organization, a librarian can help you set up a project management plan for searching, reading, annotating, and synthesizing scholarly literature. Librarians can also advise on how to present your deliverables to your site supervisor, which might include best practices when creating data visualizations and effective presentations.
Can you help with my thesis?
You can meet with a librarian 1:1 or drop into office hours to discuss your thesis with us!
Where can I find reporting guideline to help write up my project completely?
Equator Network
I’m discussing authorship with my collaborators. How should we define the roles of authors and contributors?
ICMJE criteria and CREDIT
Do you have recommended readings for writing code for my research projects?
Read this paper to learn more about this topic: Wilson G, Bryan J, Cranston K, Kitzes J, Nederbragt L, & Teal TK. (2017). Good enough practices in scientific computing. PLoS Computational Biology, 13(6), e1005510.
What should I know about working with tabular data?
Read this paper to learn more about this topic: Broman KW & Woo KH. (2018). Data organization in spreadsheets. The American Statistician, 72(1), 2–10.
Action Items
New Users
- Set up two-factor authentication on your phone for Yale VPN access
- Set up YaleLinks in Google Scholar
- Set up YaleLinks in PubMed
- Choose a citation manager
- Propose a meeting to consult with a Public Health librarian
- Browse bioinformatics and research data support pages
Master’s Students
- Subscribe to the monthly Cushing/Whitney Medical Library’s Upcoming Training email.
- Add money to your Yale Printing and Publishing Services PaperCut account to print on campus
- Chat with a public health librarian at office hours
PhD Students, Faculty and Staff
- Invite librarians to a class to teach your students about literature reviews, critical appraisal of scholarly and grey literature, or best practices for citation. (See examples of what we teach)
- Make readings available in Canvas with the Medical Library’s course reserves service.
- Ask about citation management
- Consult the Bioinformatics Support Hub for high-throughput data analysis.
- Explore the evidence synthesis & literature reviews service to get started on a review.
- Ask how we can help you maximize your research impact and identify non-traditional research impact areas.
- Get support for open access publishing.
- Set up an ORCiD and populate it with your existing publications
- Check if you’re in compliance with the NIH public access policy, and if you’re not, fix it
YSPH Alumni
- Bookmark the Alumni Resources for the Health Sciences guide, with information about open access tools, as well as clinical, consumer health, and global health resources.
- Browse open access theses on EliScholar written by public health students.
- Become a Medical Library Associate to support the Medical Library and reflect on your time as a student at Yale School of Public Health. Medical Library Associates have funded the creation of a digital imaging center, new exhibition cases for the central rotunda, and more. Benefits include access to the Medical Library building, use of print and electronic resources, and borrowing privileges based on membership tier.