By Shi En Kim, AHCJ Freelance Travel Fellow
Mining library resources and honing your database skills to get the story
Troves of information are available online for reporters to access without having ever to leave our seats — if you know where and how to look.
The HJ24 session, “Mining library resources and honing your database skills to get the story,” was a jam-packed overview of how journalists can up their search game. The panelists shared tips about accessing a wealth of online information from various databases and on search engines.
Panelist Gloria Willson, a director at the Levy Library at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai highlighted the National Library of Medicine, an authoritative public resource for biomedical research that’s run by the National Institutes of Health.
As a starting point for finding relevant primary literature on a subject, journalists can visit PubMed, an online repository for peer-reviewed scholarly articles. PubMed’s strength lies in its organization — users can sort and filter the results according to the topic at hand, article type, relevant patient groups and more; plus, they can also save and export their search history.
PubMed’s articles are written by scientists for scientists. When seeking information aimed at a nontechnical audience, Wilson recommends MedlinePlus. MedlinePlus’s articles also link to vetted primary research for those who want to reference the original peer-reviewed sources of information.
Your local public library can also prove to be a rich source of health information, especially if you live in or near a bustling metropolitan such as New York City. “It’s very important in your arsenal of investigative tools,” said Mary Jones, a librarian in the General Research Division of the New York Public Library (NYPL).
Using NYPL as an example, Jones demonstrated how users can tap the research catalog to gather material on various topics, including but not limited to health. The NYPL subscribes to 800 databases, among them Gale OneFile, Proquest and EBSCO. Libraries also often provide the service of scanning and emailing several pages of physical documents in their collection upon request for patrons to peruse without having to step foot into the library building, Jones said.
All these services are available to those who sign up for a membership with NYPL.
“Anyone can get a New York Public Library card,” Jones says, and she urges every attendee at the session to do so. New York residents can get a card that’s valid for three years; state visitors get a three-month membership.
Barbara Gray, the chief librarian and a journalism professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, emphasized the importance of tailoring keywords in searches. Gray recommended starting with broad terms then gradually narrowing down the search by adding specific search terms, including jargon. Repeating the same search with different filters may also illuminate hidden trends, such as whether the discourse has changed over time or how various organizations are discussing the same issue, she said.
To perform these searches with efficiency across any search platform, Boolean commands are our friends. To demonstrate a few, Gray performed a few Google searches with quotation marks, “OR” and “AND,” and “site:” to refine her results to specific types of websites. Knowing how to wield these commands can help journalists unveil official reports on government websites, she said, even if they don’t know the exact name of a file.
Access the tipsheet with the full resources from Willson, Jones and Gray here.
Shi En Kim is an independent journalist based in Washington, DC. She was a 2024 AHCJ Freelance Travel Fellow.
