Brief 2

Prepared by Mick Draper August 2008

Books
Use the Uni of Adelaide Library Catalogue to find books on this topic. If you find the books you want are on loan, you can make a request to recall the book, but even better would be to tell your lecturer who will then contact me to have the book placed in the Reserve Collection.

Journal Articles
I'm assuming that you have read the Library tutorial for science, and have a basic understanding of how to use electronic databases to find journal articles (covered in section 5 of the tutorial). If you haven't looked at this tutorial start your search for information by working through this now.

Before you use a database you should think about what you will search.
What are the main concepts in this question?
Write them down.
You are looking for information on catastrophic epidemics so you'll need to include something on virulence.

human influenza

epidemics

virulence

The main medicine/life sciences database available is PubMed.
To get access to PubMed click on the link to the database on the Library home under quick links, or find it in the catalogue.

PubMed works best when you use subject headings to find article citations.
To find the right subject headings click on MeSH Database in the blue left hand side bar.
MeSH stands for Medical Subject Headings.

Type human influenza into the MeSH for box.
Click on the Go button.

MeSH Database provides you with the subject heading Influenza, Human.
Click on the hypertext.

Scroll down the screen and click in the box to the left of Restrict Search to Major Topic headings only.
A tick will appear.
This will mean that the citations you find will be to articles that have human influenza as a major aspect.

Scroll up the screen and click on the Send to box.
A pull down menu will appear.

Click on Search box with AND

This will open up a PubMed search box with the first of your terms included.
Type your second term epidemics into the MeSH for box.
Click on the Go button.

This time the MeSH database takes you to several headings that might suit you. The appropriate heading is Disease Outbreaks.
Click on the hypertext.

Scroll down and click in the box to the left of Restrict Search to Major Topic headings only as before.
Click on Send to.
Click on Search box with AND.
Once again your search term will be added to the PubMed search box along with Influenza, Human.

Now type your third search term virulence into the MeSH search box and click on the Go button.

This time I think it won't matter too much whether you search this as a major subject heading or as major or minor.
Just click in the box to the left of the term
Click on Send to
Click on Search box with AND

When your new term appears in the PubMed search box,
Click on the Search PubMed button.

Your search results will appear.
Some of them will be citations to foreign language articles.
To remove these, click on the Limits tab.

Scroll down and click in the box to the left of English.

Scroll to the top of the screen and click on the Go button.

Now you have a list of citation to journal articles in English.

To display the abstracts of these citations, and in some cases find a link to the full text of the articles change the display format from Summary to Abstract.
Click on the Display box.
A pull down menu appears.
Click on Abstract.

If a Uni of Adelaide online icon appears you can click on it to find the full text of the article.

If there is no Uni of Adelaide icon, don't give up.
Point your mouse cursor at the abbreviated journal title, but don't click.
The full title of the the journal will appear for about 10 seconds.

Open the Library catalogue using a new window and search for the title as a journal.

Meanwhile back at PubMed,
If you find a citation to a good article and want to find more that are similar,
Click on Related Articles at the top right of the citation.

Now you might like to try another search but this time substituting forecasting for virulence.

If you need more help contact Mick Draper, but be warned that I will ask you if you have read the Library tutorial for Science, and what you have done to search for articles.