All information should be evaluated, but assessing reliability is especially important when using websites. Print resources such as magazines, journals, and books have been through a filtering process (e.g. editing, peer-review, library selection), but information from most websites is usually unfiltered. While quality information can be found, many non-quality sites also exist. In general, it's better to use sites ending in .gov, .edu, or. org, and not .com sites.
See the InfoGuide linked below for more information on evaluating websites.
In addition to the subscription based resources that FNU provides on the library website, there are other resources for health information that are freely available via the internet.
PubMed is a search interface for the MEDLINE database that is available to the public as a free resource. In previous sections, we searched the MEDLINE database using the EBSCOhost interface. PubMed includes some additional citations (from life science journals and online books), but for the most part it has the same content as MEDLINE via EBSCOhost. PubMed provides links to free full text articles when available, whereas searching through EBSCOhost provides links to FNU’s subscription resources.
PubMed was developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) as a service of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). See related links below:
Finding health statistics will be very important to you both as a student and a professional. Statistics can demonstrate trends and support research and evidence based practice. Demographic data can help to put statistics into context and is important for understanding the populations you serve. Government websites make much of this information easy to obtain. There are many different sites for finding statistical and demographic data. The following list is certainly not comprehensive, but will provide a starting point.
Consumer health sites provide information on health conditions in a way that is easy for non-health professionals to understand. These sites are reliable, but are not considered to be scholarly sources.
See the InfoGuide linked below for more information on consumer health resources.
