We welcome Mrs. Glover’s and Mrs. Tepedino’s health classes to the library this week to find information to support a group presentation on a specific disease.

Remember your essential question: what do we need to do to convince the Board of Directors at Strong Hospital to award us a $1,000,000 grant to fund research for our disease?

After defining the task, we decided that someone in the medical community would be the ideal source for this health-related project, so we set out to find information that we knew was written or reviewed by medical professionals, or at least was sponsored by medical organizations.

Since we are looking for 3 reliable sources for our brief presentations, we decided Wikipedia wasn’t the best source because of the uncertainty of the original authors, as well as the extensive medical terms that are used in the rather long articles.

We decided that since many of the overview articles at WebMD were written and reviewed by medical professionals, and couldn’t be changed by just anyone, that site might lead us to reliable sources.

We also considered the search process itself, and briefly discussed how Google and other search engines rank their search results; not by how reliable or “good” the information is, but by how many other web sites link to it — essentially, a popularity contest.

SweetSearch was introduced as a search engine that does give an indication of how reliable the search results may be, since “every web site in SweetSearch has been evaluated by [their] research experts” — sweet!

EasyBib and BibMe (both free!) are resources to keep in mind when it’s time for producing bibliographic citations. The bibliographic robots don’t always get it right, however, so we should check the suggested citation against the Research Manual Style Guide to make sure it’s accurate, and make changes as necessary.