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.

Google has started a new portal for health information called, naturally, Google Health, with links to current news and information from trusted medical organizations. We decided that since many of the overview articles at the Mayo Clinic and WebMD were written and reviewed by medical professionals, and couldn’t be changed by just anyone, those sites might lead us to reliable sources.

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.