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Physician Assistant

Start here when researching for Physician Assistant classes

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Features of Journal Articles:

  • Also known as peer-reviewed or academic articles, they are written by experts and/or highly trained professionals in a particular field.
  • The rigorous peer-review process ensures articles are vetted and fact-checked before publication.
  • Journal articles typically focus on a topic through a very narrow lens.

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Features of Scholarly Books:

  • Due to the length, they typically cover a topic more broadly than journal articles.
  • They are typically written for a larger audience than journal articles.
  • They may contain a collection of related chapters by different authors.

Important Note: In most cases you'll only use a chapter or two for your research so don't be scared off by the length of a book.

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Websites:

Google and Google Scholar are different Internet search engines designed for different purposes. Google searches the entire Internet, regardless of the information type or source. Google Scholar, as the name suggests, provides a simple way to limit your Internet search to the scholarly literature only. It includes the Advance Scholar Search menu, which provides additional search options beyond keywords. Some full-text documents are available through Google Scholar. However, we recommend that you begin any search for clinical information via MEDLINE or PubMed, so that you have access to the comprehensive indexing structure and searching capabilities of the National Library of Medicine's premier database.

For a more in-depth description of Google Scholar, please click here.

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Features of News Articles:

  • Written by journalists and typically reviewed by one or more editors.
  • Can provide in the moment coverage of current events.
  • Written for a broad audience.

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Search Everything

Search Everything is the library's equivalent to Google. In addition to searching everything in the Library's Catalog (books, ebooks, media, etc.) it also searches most of our databases containing journal articles and other electronic resources.