Looking to write your next term paper on the health care reform? To find reliable published sources of information for your course assignments, the library has many electronic options. From the Library web page, with your UNH network username and password you can get full text articles and books related to your topic. It doesn’t even matter if you are not on campus! The menu listings on the Library Home page for these sources are Catalog – UNH, Databases, and Journals. Following is an example of what can be found in each of these, using the current hot topic of the pros and cons of the Health Care bill.
Catalog – UNH is the library’s online catalog (also a database, but that’s another story), which lists not only the printed books on the shelves in the library, but also many full text online books. We especially cater to those published by the U.S. government on topics important to the UNH academic programs. Typing in “health care” as subject keywords and selecting Quick Limit can minimize 2000 results into a list of over 400. The articles are sorted by date, with the most recent being ones: White House Forum on Health Reform (2009), a 54 page book published by the Office of the President, covering all the issues (pro and con) about the current health care legislation. Other full text books from this search include government hearings, which are filled with expert testimony on related topics such as ways to reduce the cost of health insurance, strengthening the Medicare payment system, and strengthening employer-provided health care – as well as exploring the truth about veterans’ suicides, not the intended topic, but one of grave concern and interest all the same.
Databases are electronic collections of books and articles (from journals, magazines, and newspapers) on all imaginable topics. For this health care topic, which is interdisciplinary, you can start with the subject listing and the group of databases called general. Typing “health care” in the CQ Researcher database and sorting by date to get the most recent, leads to a report on the Tea Party Movement, which certainly covers controversy about the health care bill. In the Academic OneFile database, the subject search for Health Care Reform (full text sources only) from Jan. 2009 to the present gives about 14,000 sources in journals, magazines and newspapers, and multimedia. Below the general databases is a group called Health. Searching the subject Health Care Reform in the Health & Wellness Resource Center gives over 15,000 results. Searching the phrase “health care reform” from Jan. 2009 to today in the Highwire database of scientific journals gives over 1300 articles. By now you probably have more than enough excellent sources for your paper or presentation.
The Journals option in the library menu lists all journals, magazines, and newspapers available to our community. If you have a citation from a particular journal and need the article, type the journal title in here. But if you want to see what journals are available on a particular topic, pick the subject search drop-down, select your subject area, click search and then click on the specific topic of interest – for example Public Health, which gives a list of online journals related to this topic.
Best wishes for a pleasant research experience, and be sure to ask for help!
