We encounter information in many types of sources, and any of them can potentially be reliable - depending on your research context, the credibility & accuracy of the source and its relevance to your specific research focus.
The following resources offer excellent strategies for evaluating your online sources:
Evaluating Grey Literature: UBC Library
Lateral Reading & SIFT: University of Michigan
Digital Literacy: University of Cincinnati
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When starting research, it’s natural to turn to Google for quick answers, but it simply cannot provide the array of scholarly research available in a typical library database. After all, its main purpose is to find websites, not academic articles. That said Google is the primary way to find "grey literature," e.g., health-related information that is published outside of the traditional, scholarly publishing world but that is nonetheless important and highly credible. In many cases your research may depend as much on grey literature as it does on scholarly articles. |
Key web-based materials, aka "Grey Literature"
You may be wondering what types of grey literature are important for health researchers. You'll need to think about the questions you're trying to answer and then what types of organization would typically provide such information. For example:
Do you need a “fact” to support some advice you’d like to give? The facts you need might just be found in a statistical table or report.
Do you need to understand your employer’s rules & regulations better? You'll most likely find this on your organization's website or intranet.
Are you interested in comparing local policy guidelines to those in other places? This is another job for your web-browser!
Organizations that typically create, compile, and share content such as health statistics & datasets; internal research & committee reports; clinical practice guidelines; professional standards; policy papers etc., include:
Key organizations for BC nurses and nursing students include:
BC College of Nurses & Midwives - the licencing/regulatory body for BC nurses, psychiatric nurses, nurse practitioners, and midwives. This should be your first stop for practice standards, professional standards & learning resources for each of the above health professionals in BC.
Canadian Indigenous Nurses Association - this organization provides an array of useful publications on topics relating to improving the health and well-being of Indigenous individual and communities, including:
Canadian Nurses Association (CNA) - the national nursing organization, "representing Canada's 466,000 regulated nurses, across all 13 provinces and territories," the CNA produces and freely provides a wide range of policy & practice support tools, as well as information, nursing standards and (where available) links to symposiums/proceedings/other research resources on specific topics including nursing informatics, non-medical cannabis use, emergency preparedness and more.
Canadian Nursing Students' Association (CNSA)- "A bilingual and pan-Canadian organization advocating for the needs of all nursing students," the CNSA hosts the premier annual nursing student conference and provides useful resources for students including an NCLEX fact sheet (PDF), "how to conference" video and links to its governing documents.
Nurses & Nurse Practitioners of British Columbia (NNPBC): "The Association of Nurses and Nurse Practitioners of British Columbia (NNPBC) is the professional association that represents the voice of all four nursing designations in BC – RNs, LPNs, RPNs and NPs."
Important websites & pages for health research:
government agencies and departments, including the BC Ministry of Health or the Canadian Institutes of Health Research
BC health authorities - information about and links to the Province's 5 HAs.
research datasets deposited in data repositories
Institutional repositories, such as Douglas College's DOOR site.
Google Advanced Search
| A great way to find grey literature is using Google's Advanced Search interface. Its key advantage is that it will allow you to limit your search to specific websites, such as Douglas College or specific families of websites, such as all BC government websites. |
Some Advanced Google Search suggestions:
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is another Google service, which focuses on scholarly content. It's a great addition to your research toolkit - but it's not a replacement for searching in the scholarly databases available through the library!
Advantages include:
However, it has some limitations to be aware of:
It typically links to the publisher's website, rather than the Library website.
It doesn't seamlessly allow authorized users to authenticate into subscription content, making it sometimes seem like you don't have access to content the Library does pay for.
Many journals do not allow their content to be crawled by the tool, so its results may be dated and/or represent a tiny fraction of the research on your topic.
You can't be certain that these articles will be current, peer-reviewed or freely accessible at a glance or by using a limiter.
You can't limit your results by subject, methodology or demographic groups as you can when using databases like CINAHL or PsycINFO.