Public Health covers a particularly broad range of fields. Consider whether the articles you're looking for would have been published in medical and health sciences journals (PubMed), psychology and counseling journals (PsycInfo), education journals (ERIC), or one of the other fields below.
One model of searching for information divides searches into Lookup Searches, Exploratory Searches, and Systematic Searches. Researchers perform exploratory searches when they are learning about a new topic, becoming familiar with the type of research being done in that area, and learning the relevant vocabulary. These two tutorials describe the use of PubMed to perform exploratory searches.
Though the first video is called Basic PubMed, it primarily reviews features that make searching and viewing articles more efficient:
The second video, called PubMed Searching with MeSH, presents the underlying attributes of PubMed that can either help or sometimes hinder searching:
- Get the full text of an article.
- See if the Libraries have the article in print.
- If we don't own the article, fill out an interlibrary loan request
You probably already use article bibliographies to find older articles on the same topic. You can use citation searching to find more recent articles that cite a relevant older article that you already have.
These two databases can be searched like any other database, but also have a citation searching feature.