About Andrew Van Dam
Andrew Van Dam of The Wall Street Journal previously worked at the AHCJ offices while earning his master’s degree at the Missouri School of Journalism.
There’s a reason the folks from the National Library of Medicine are fixtures at AHCJ events: Medical research is an art that takes years to truly master. In an effort to ease that learning curve, at least in their area of expertise, the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma has put together a tool they’re billing as “the definitive bibliography of scholarship on journalism and trauma.” The DART Research Database is a thorough list of articles that is easy to sort and sift through.
Browsing a carefully curated selection like this isn’t like punching words into Google Scholar or an NLM tool, there aren’t enough sources to make keyword searches rewarding. Instead, use the database by clicking on “Advanced Search” and narrowing by “Trauma / Survivor Type,” “Psychological Disorders Discussed” or “Article content.”
A note for AHCJ’s student journalists: Choose your favorite category, click the big red “GO” button, and you’ll immediately be the proud owner of all the key secondary sources needed for a sizable paper or thesis. It’s in this sort of academic implementation that the database truly shines. After all, this is fundamentally a database of articles about journalism, not one of articles to use in works of journalism.
Andrew Van Dam of The Wall Street Journal previously worked at the AHCJ offices while earning his master’s degree at the Missouri School of Journalism.
The journalists, from a wide range of outlets, will visit the National Institutes of Health in September. The visit will include hands-on workshops about how to use and get the most from several government research databases, such as PubMed, MedlinePlus, ClinicalTrials.gov and ToxNet. Fellows also will meet with senior NLM and NIH researchers and officials for exclusive informational sessions.
