Information Literacy for Health Sciences Students: Background and Foreground

When you are new to a topic, we recommend starting with Background information. In the UCSF environment this translates to books and review articles. This material provides context, is often more general, is more likely to be out of date, and provides the information you need to understand foreground information

Book collections: Each of these is found by searching in the search box on the library home page.

• AccessMedicine - a very useful set of textbooks.
  • Pay attention to:
    • Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine
    • Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment
    • Diagnosaurus is a differential diagnosis app that useful to medical students in the first year 
• AccessSurgery
• PharmacyLibrary

Global Search 

Refers to the single search box on the Library home page. Here you can search for everything to which UCSF Library has access. Regardless of whether it is a book, chapter, journal or article, whether it comes from PubMed or Web of Science! 

The search box understands AND, OR, quotation marks, parentheses, truncation (*). You can save what you find in a reference manager. This can be a great place to start learning about a topic.

The UCSF Library Catalog

• Library catalog - it is a bit old school but here you can find the large number of electronic books we have access to at UCSF.
• How do I do that?
• Find the catalog at library.ucsf.edu. It can be found in two places. You will see Library Catalogs in the middle of the homepage for quick and dumbed down search functionality.​
• Under Find Materials tab, find UCSF Library Catalog.
• You can look things up by Subject or Keyword (most common).
• You can also look by Title and Author if you are seeking something specific.
• Notes:
  • Keyword: 
  • Subject, probably the most complete search. Look for main subject of interest. Once you identify the subject, click on that, set to sort results by material type (see image below).
  • Title, see examples provided in catalog
  • Author, see examples provided in catalog.

A Word about Databases:

They are built for retrieval of information.

They often have a dictionary or glossary of terms. In the library world these are called Controlled vocabularies, The names vary by database: e.g., MeSH in PubMed, Emtree in Embase, Thesaurus in PsycINFO, CINAHL Headings in CINAHL.

Databases: Choose based on topic

Each of the databases in the table above can be found by searching in the search box on the library home page; results will be found to the right of the page in the Database area.

There are a wealth of databases to be found in the Databases link in Popular Links on the Library Homepage.

"Meta Search Engines"