Nursing

Now use Boolean operators to connect your search terms. 

Use OR to combine all the terms for the same concept: employment OR job

Use AND to combine terms from different concepts: "primary school" AND "social determinants of health"

Use quotation marks to search for a phrase: "higher education"

Use brackets to group all terms from the same concept together

Watch the following video to learn more about Boolean operators

When you put it together: 

("public education" OR "private education") AND  career* AND australia*

You will probably need to alter your search terms as you go.

Suggested databases for this assignment are:

This assessment asks you to find information and statistics about your local government area. These will not be found in Quicksearch or databases, but on the internet. Follow these tips to find more useful results when searching Google.

• Boolean operators work in Google too. So, to find information about income in the City of Frankston, you might type in:
  • education AND Frankston
• Information from local governments will be on government websites. You can limit the results to these, by adding the following after your search terms:
  • site:gov.au

For local council social services, check the official council website, under headings such as 'Family and Community Services'.

Some other websites that you might find useful for local government information are: 

Australian Bureau of Statistics

Government health websites

Is this information relevant to your assignment? Is there likely to be better information? This will depend on what you are trying to find out. Often you will need to read the abstract to find out.

Is this aimed at the correct audience? Articles for this assessment should be peer reviewed. If you are not sure, you can copy and paste the title into Quicksearch to see if the purple peer review icon shows in the result:

Alternatively, you can check the journal title in Ulrichs. If it has a small black icon that looks like a book next to the title, it is peer reviewed (called refereed in Ulrichs).

You are unlikely to find peer reviewed journal articles about local government areas. Use some of the sources listed in the Local Government Information tab in the box above instead.

Who wrote it? What are their qualifications? Are the qualifications relevant to the topic? Most peer reviewed articles will have information about the authors, often at the end or hyperlinked, with their qualifications listed. 

Where do they work? Who do they work for? Generally, authors should be working for a university or a research centre of some kind. 

Are they likely to have a good understanding of this field?

For the local government information, if the website URL ends in .gov.au then it is an Australian government source and should be authoritative, for example https://www.casey.vic.gov.au/ is the website for the City of Casey. There may also be some companies contracted to provide statistics for local governments.

What is the study population size and characteristics? Keep in mind this is dependent on the study type, for example qualitative studies usually have smaller study populations than quantitative. 

Is there a control group? This is a group that does not receive the treatment, and allows the researchers to compare them to the group getting the treatment to see if it works.

Is there blinding? This is where the control and treatment groups do not know whether they are getting the intervention or not. 

Do the statistics make sense and match the authors' claims? For local government information, do they make sense compared to what you already know? Are they in line with what you might expect?

Who funded the study? Is it a company, university or research organisation? If it is a company, do they manufacture a product being tested? 

Is there any obvious bias where the authors or their employers are likely to benefit from the study recommendations? For example, if the authors work for a particular company and recommend the use of one of their products, this could indicate a risk of bias.

Does it state what the authors' were trying to find out? The research aims or questions should be clearly stated in the beginning of the article, and the conclusions should describe what they found out.