information competency research guides

Instructor: Gloria Ensey

Health 120

Purpose: Use this research guide to help you complete your research paper and other Health 120 assignments.

Health Appraisal Assignment

1. Visit the Health Service Office and request: Blood pressure reading/recording and percentage of body fat assessment.

2. Visit the http://www.mypyramid.gov/. Got to this site by "new user registration" in lower right-hand corner. Proceed to "food intake" and record your food intake for seven days. Compare your food intake for seven days to the My pyramid Recommendations and dietary guidelines.

3. Visit http://www.healthnotes.info/qs_db/index.cfm?org=cuyamaca and look through this site. Find three articles regarding nutrition, weight management or Fitness. Summarize three different articles. Each article summary should be a single paragraph (what you learned from the article, what you liked or disliked about the article).

Research Paper assignment

Getting Started
As many people have discovered, clicking on a favorite search engine and entering a disease or medical condition can often result in hundreds, even thousands, of "hits." This can be discouraging. Here are a few ideas for filtering the available Web pages to a manageable number:

1. If you are using a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, take advantage of the health subsets of these services for your search. Learn how to use the advanced searching features of the sites so that you can combine terms to make your retrieval more precise. For example, entering the term "cancer" and "chemotherapy" linked together is more powerful and precise than trying to read through all the hits found by simply entering the general term "cancer."

2. Become familiar with the general health information finding tools listed below.

Selected Websites

American Cancer society

A merican Diabetes Associations

American Heart Association

A merican Lung Association

A merican Medical Association

American Public Health Association

American Speech Language and Hearing Association

Centers for disease control and prevention

Children's Defense Fund

Federal Drugs Administration

Harvard Health Letter

Healthy people 2010

Indian Health Service

MayoClinic.com

National Diabetes Info Clearinghouse

National Institutes of Health

Nutrition.gov

American Institute of Stress

Tufts University Nutrition Center

United States Dept of Agriculture

Achoo Gateway to Healthcare

Government Healthfinder (search engine)

Medline Plus (search engine)

Physician's Guide to the Internet

Cite Resources Using MLA Style

The MLA Handbook is located in the general stacks under the call number LB 2369 G52, as well as on the Reference shelves under Ref LB 2369 G52 (books in the general stacks may be checked out).

Important Note =>When using a magazine or journal article from a database, such as Infotrac Onefile, you must cite it differently than you would if you used a paper copy.

Here is an example of a citation in MLA style for a source found in the database Infotrac Onefile.

Phinney, Alan. "Cinderella Cactus." Sunset Oct. 2001.
            Infotrac Onefile. Gale Group. Cuyamaca College Lib.,
            El Cajon, CA. 17 Dec. 2003
            <http://web6.infotrac.galegroup.com>

The above citation in MLA Style would be very different if you found a copy of this article in an actual magazine.

Phinney, Alan. "Cinderella Cactus."
Sunset Oct. 2001: 78-80.

For additional help on how to format your citations, take a look at our MLA Style Guide, try one of the following guides:

Assembling a List of Works Cited in Your Paper - Covers four style guides: Turabian, Chicago Manual of Style, MLA Handbook, and the APA style guide. Created by Duke Libraries at Duke University.

Style Sheets for Citing Internet & Electronic Resources: Humanities (MLA & Chicago), Scientific (APA & CBE), and History (Turabian) - Created by the University of California Berkeley Libraries.

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