To find articles, including articles from peer-reviewed journals, your best bet will be to search using LCC's EBSCO databases. To find the search blank, start at the Library's main webpage and click on the “Find Articles & Databases" link:
Database searching is different than searching Google. For example, in Google, you can type in a whole sentence or more and expect to get useful results. The databases function better when you use just 2 or 3 words or phrases.
If I want to find articles that mention both flame retardants and something about toxicity, my search might look something like this (Hot Tips are in the red boxes):
If you're off campus, you'll need to sign in using your L# and LCC passphrase.
Then use the options under "Refine Results" on the left to better target your search:
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For example, you may want to specify that you only want articles from a certain date range. For scientific and technical topics, you probably don't want articles that are more that 5 to 10 years old. |
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Or you may want to click on "Academic Journals" so that you don't encounter a lot of book reviews. |
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There may be other ways to save you time. For example, under "Subjects," you can click on the checkbox next to "fireproofing agents" then hit the "Update" button to throw out any articles that aren't entirely about that concept. After all, you don't want articles that just happen to mention what you're looking for. You want the whole article to be about that! Click on "Show More" for other useful subjects, such as "Bioaccumulation" or "endocrine disruptors." Click on more than one subject term at a time in different combinations. |
You are probably used to searching Google. But databases are different animals, and if you search them as if they are Google you might not find much. Here are some quick tips:
Start with the important words: medical and marijuana, then brainstorm other synonyms or related concepts. Here are a few examples, but there are many more:
medical marijuana [related terms]
therapeutic cannabis cancer
prescription THC appetite
doctors tetrahydrocannabinol chemotherapy
dispensary marinol multiple sclerosis
remedy pot pain
Different authors describe the same thing in different ways depending on who they are writing for and the context of the article. Each of these words and phrases in different combinations will bring back different search results. Here are some example searches you can use in databases or even on the Web:
therapeutic marijuana
therapeutic cannabi*
medic* tetrahydrocannabinol
dispens* marijuana
marinol thc appetite
marijuana dispensar* pain