Library Orientation Exercises

Exercise 1. Formulate a research question

1. Identify your research interests. Fill the boxes that you can.

Element Example My Interests

Phenomenon mobile phone

What happened? health services

Subject or Population
health consumers
Who did it?

Time
preventive care
When did it happen?

Location
anywhere
Where did it happen?

Motivation
adoption decision
Why did it happen?

Process introduction by
How did it happen? nurses

2. Write a research question to tie the above elements together.

Example: When health consumers are introduced to mobile phone health services for
preventive care by nurses, what variables influence the decision to adopt the
technology?
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Exercise 2. Formulate a search statement

1. Identify the main ideas of your research question. In the second

column, give synonyms and related concepts.

Main Idea Synonyms and Related Concepts

2. What is an idea you wish to exclude from your search, if any?

Excluded idea

Exercise continues next page …

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3. Formulate a search statement with AND, OR, NOT, ( ), and * operators.

Search statement

Example
("mobile phone" OR "cellular phone" OR smartphone OR
telephone OR telemedicine) AND nurses AND health care
delivery AND adoption AND prevent*
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Exercise 3. Search for articles

1. Launch the Berkeley version of PubMed. Visit your Berkeley

Library Guide at guides.lib.berkeley.edu/jmp. Open the Articles
tab. Select PubMed.

2. Run your search. Use the search statement from the previous exercise.

3. Sort results by relevance. Above the search results, click the Sort by
menu and select Best Match.

4. Activate a search filter. Try review articles or an age group. For

more options, click Show additional filters.

5. Review your results.

a. Pick an article or 2 of interest and view the abstracts.

b. Check out the MeSH Terms.

c. Search for a copy of the article. Click the UC-eLinks button.

6. Learn from your results. Are there any MeSH terms you want to
now add to your search string? Anything else you learned?
New Idea

Article
1

Article
2
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7. Change your search. Based on what you learned, revise your

search statement to reflect changing interests or focus.

Revised search statement

8. Run the new search. And clear the filters from earlier.

9. Skim an article.

a. Select an article of interest. Find a copy with UC-eLinks.

b. Skim the article.

c. What did you learn? How does this change your

research question or interests?

Changing interests