Searching a Multidisciplinary Database

PART 1

Why was the Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919 (H1N1) more deadly than other influenza outbreaks, and how did the U.S. respond to treat those infected and (reduce or prevent) spread of the disease?

PART 2

A.      Main Concepts

a.       Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919 causes of mortality

b.       U.S. treatment of

c.       U.S. measures to prevent spread of

B.      Search Statement

a.       “influenza epidemic 1918-1919” AND United States

C.       Do a Search

a.       I looked up the search statement listed above. In the main line I listed “influenza epidemic 1918-1919”; in the next line I used the Boolean operator AND then entered the words United States. (I was given 183 results, some of which look rather interesting!)

D.      Database limiters  

a.       English

b.       Abstracts

These narrowed my search results significantly—from 183 to 3!

 

PART 3

 

First, I discovered that I am a very wordy person (which didn’t come as a surprise to me). I had to learn that sometimes in searching for materials for my research, less can be more. When I included too many words in my search, I got no results and way too many possible related items. But when I removed most of those words (like causes, treatment of, or prevent spread of) I got some results. I think I would like to be able to adjust my timeframe a bit though. For some reason, the side bar placed all my results between 2001 and 2020. This brought up some interesting looking articles that compare COVID 19 to the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919 that I might want to look at. However, I feel like I might also really like to just look at some of the history of the epidemic specifically.

Comments

  1. SamOctober 9, 2020 at 3:14 PM

    Hi Robin, good observations on your search. I'm not sure why you are not seeing older articles in your search results but it might be worth trying a database focused on history such as America: History & Life. I think that limiting to abstracts is probably filtering out a lot of articles. The "Abstract" document type means short abstracts that are published without the full paper or article--usually as part of a summary of papers that were given at a conference or that are scheduled to be published later. There aren't a whole lot of these in ASC (fortunately) but they can be frustrating when you find them--in many cases the paper itself is hard to track down or was never published. So it will usually work better to limit to articles or to scholarly journals.--Sam

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