Registered Nursing

• US FDA Drug Information Food and Drug Administration website of information on drugs for humans, such as label information and FDA approval history. Look for the search link at the top of the page as well as links for healthcare professionals and consumers under Resources for You (bottom of page).
• PubMed  National Library of Medicine - National Institutes of Health launching point for health sciences information, from peer-reviewed literature to clinical trials. Be sure to look at the PubMed User Guide/FAQs for help with searches and information on finding the full text of articles. Also check out the single citation matcher, useful if you have incomplete information about an article. Click on Advanced Search for more highly targeted searches.
• Health Services Research (HSR) PubMed Queries - Use this page to search PubMed for articles on healthcare quality and costs. You can limit by several categories such as outcomes assessment, process assessment, appropriateness, costs, and a few others.
• Clinicaltrials.gov - Search here to find information on pending and ongoing clinical research studies and their results from around the world. Maintained by the National Library of Medicine. Note: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other U.S. agencies only approve the studies that they fund. U.S. government agencies do not fund all the studies listed on ClinicalTrials.gov.
• Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy - Online   Online version, with features not available in the print version, and "continuously updated to ensure that the information is as up-to-date as possible."
• Calculating Sample Size for Different Study Designs in Medical Research   Involves lots of equations, but gives you an idea of the issues related to sample size.
• CDC - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention   A very well organized website for starting research and for finding health statistics. Extensive information about health and disease from the US Department of Health and Human Services.
• MedlinePlus   US National Library of Medicine website providing health information to the general public. Great place to look for quick information handouts for patients.
• National Institutes of Health (NIH)   Website of the Federal government agency charged with being the "steward of medical and behavioral research for the Nation." Site provides consumer health information, information on clinical trials, and an array of health and research-related information

• Physician's Desk Reference - Drug Information    Browse or search for drug information on this classic resource which is now available fully online.

Searching for information on the web efficiently requires developing a search strategy. Take your topic and think how you will turn it into search terms. While you can certainly search the web by entering a question, a stronger search strategy would be to choose the most impactful words of your question, and shape it in a way that the search engine understands.

If your research question is "What is the best solution to homelessness in the Bay Area?" the most essential elements to find are solution, homelessness, and the Bay Area. It can help to brainstorm alternatives to the words IN your research question, because different words will surface different results in your search.

Note: the quotation marks around some search terms help tell the search engine that you want results with the words stuck together exactly as you have them.

Combining three of my search concepts, a sample Google search is shown below.