Public Health Project (Fall 2022)

While you may use professional web sites as sources in this assignment, you must take care NOT to use those with a .com domain, Wikipedia, or any other non-reputable/scholarly sites. Be sure that any sites you use are affiliated with a reputable organization AND were published within the past 5 years. The two simple Google search tricks listed below will help you eliminate many unhelpful results, but you must still carefully evaluate each result. If you have any questions as to the reliability of a given result, contact me, a librarian, or your instructor.

As a reminder, you are prohibited from using .com web sites for this assignment. For assignments such as this, .org (professional organization), .edu (educational institutions), or .gov (government entities) domains will almost always provide you with the best results. Luckily, there is a very simple trick in Google that will help you narrow down to a given domain! Just type site: after your keyword search and insert a non-.com domain. For example, the Google search for diabetes returns 4.4 billion results, and there are unhelpful results on the first page from sites like Wikipedia, WebMD, and Healthline. However, the search for diabetes site:.gov returns 80 million results, with exceptionally high-quality results from government agencies like the CDC, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and the National Library of Medicine returned on the first page. Use the domain limiter! It will help you avoid unhelpful results.

Because you are required to only use web sites published within the last 5 years, it is strongly recommended that you use Google's date limiter for all of your searches. To limit by date, first perform your search and then click on the Tools button beneath the search bar, as shown below.
 

A drop-down menu titled "Any time" will appear beneath the search bar. Click on it and select "Custom range..." Google's Custom Date Limiter will then appear, as shown below. Enter your date range and click "Go." Adding the date limiter to the diabetes site:.gov search narrowed us down to 75 results, compared to the 4.4 billion we received searching diabetes alone. Please use these limiters! As always, contact me or the library should you have any questions.