Welcome!

This page has been put together by the librarians for this course. It contains hand-picked resources which will be useful in your research. There are also some handy tips here. We encourage you to contact us directly for research help! We are available during the semester whenever you need us.

Diane Sredl (sredl@fas or 6-6936)

Finding What You Need

Research Articles

  • HOLLIS offers easy searching of all the materials that Harvard owns - books, journal articles, images, etc. Sign in, enter your search term(s), and go. Then you can limit your search in various ways, including by peer-reviewed journals. (Don't forget to sign in so that you have access to everything the university pays for!) 
  • PubMed is the primary database for medical literature, including health policy. Enter your search term(s) and take advantage of the many limits such as Article Type (e.g., Review), publication dates, etc.
  • Web of Science is a general science database, also with social science information. Expand it using All Databases and focus your results by Sorting, Refining, selecting Document Types etc. You can also look at the results by the number of times other articles have cited them (Times Cited), and this may indicate articles that are considered the most important on the subject.
  • Google Scholar is another way to gauge which articles are important for a subject using its the relevancy ranking, but it is less precise than either PubMed or the Web of Knowledge.

Key Web Resources for Nutrition:

Key Resources for Health Policy

  • PAIS International indexes the public and social policy literature of public administration, political science, economics, finance, international relations, law, and health care. 
  • PolicyFile indexes policy reports and studies published by think tanks, university research programs, research organizations that include the OECD, IMF, World Bank, the Rand Corporation, and a number of federal agencies.

Statistics