Health Care Management: Overview

ABI/Inform and Business Source Complete are important general databases for business.  They include a lot of scholarly, trade, and popular articles.  APPsearch includes Business Source Complete and PsycINFO but not ABI/Inform.

Use PubMed.  But also, HCM is so interdisciplinary that it makes sense to use interdisciplinary tools.  So use APPsearch and Google Scholar.  You can also selectively use more focused databases.

Try searching on a specific practice, process, structure, or characteristic of organizations.  Or choose a specific outcome or indicator.  Or include a specific setting.  Scientific or insider terminology will eliminate lots of unwanted results.

When not in a health-related database (e.g., CINAHL, PubMed), I like to include in searches: (healthcare OR "health care").  This will allow you to narrow your search to your field.  Don't do this all the time, because you will also want to know how your topics are seen outside health care.

Variables:

• Which keywords/phrases/subject headings? 
• Which database/catalog/search engine? 
• Boolean logic: AND, OR, NOT, "quotation marks" UNC's explanation. 
• Limiting your search: by years, by subject, by type of publication, by population, etc. 
• Relevance ranking.  In PubMed, be sure to ask for Best Match.  It's the default in other databases.
• Track citations: when you find one good source, who does it cite and who cites it?  Google Scholar is good for this.  Cited by.
• Browsing journals helps sometimes.  See links to left on this page for some of our journals in HCM

Try including the word "review" in your search.  (You might get a few book reviews that you don't want.)  Recent review articles are very useful.  They will give you a good overview of the topic and have a comprehensive list of references.  (The health science databases will allow you to limit results to "systematic reviews" as well.)

One example.