Answered Questions

Hello! Glad you asked!

The LibGuides are lists of places to look for information, so if you want information related to gerontology, the Gerontology LibGuide is the place to start. Clicking the Articles tab takes you to links to places to look for articles about gerontology and related subjects. There are a variety of sources are listed on the page such as PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, Medline, and Mental Measurements. Each of these places to look for articles contains different articles (with a little overlap), so you might need to search more than one. PsycINFO is a good starting point. Click on the link to PsycINFO and log into the database.

Rather than beginning with the search terms, scroll down the page and choose the limiters first. The most useful one will be age groups. Given the gerontology perspective, choose "aged" and "very old". Next set the date range; 5 years is generally Dr. Kin's preference, so enter 2007-2012. Choose peer-reviewed (although almost all of the articles in this collection are peer reviewed). Then scroll back to the top of the page to enter the search terms.

The next step is to translate the research topic into search terms which will yield good results. This can take several tries! Here's my thought process. I'm not so sure that "long term care" is a good search, so I'll test that first to see if the results are relevant. Be sure to include the quotation marks to focus your results. I got 600 results. Looking down the left side column under Subject: Major Heading, I see my term, "long term care" listed, and I can tell from the article titles that the results are relevant, so I know I'm using a good search term. Next I'll add AND gay AND lesbian AND bisexual AND transgender.

The whole search will look like this: "long term care" AND gay AND lesbian AND bisexual AND transgender. The "ands" are an important part of the search, so include them. Unfortunately, it yields just one article. The good news is that it is highly relevant; the bad news is that the full text is not available. I clicked to FIND IT button, but it didn't find it this time. If you have a couple of weeks, you can request it by clicking the Request Information Delivery button and we will try to get the full text for you.

The low number of results means that the obvious search terms may be too narrow. My next step is to broaden the search by reducing the number of search terms or trying synonyms. First I tried a synonym, "long term care" AND "sexual orientation", which yielded one good article (Lesbian and gay elders and long-term care: Identifying the unique psychosocial perspectives and challenges).

Then I reduced the number of search terms, looking for each orientation separately. I had limited success. I applied the same strategy to my other search term, broadening "long term care" to "health care". Searching "health care" AND gay AND lesbian yielded several relevant results.

In the results of all of these searches, identify research articles by looking for the words "study", "qualitative", "quantitative", "methodology", "results", "participants", "data", etc. In addition to research articles, literature reviews may also prove useful.

If you don't have enough material, go back to the Gerontology LibGuide, choose another database from the Articles tab, and apply these strategies there.