Courses in health care innovation sometimes ask you to find, read, and respond to scholarship, grey literature, trade publications, and high-quality journalism about health care and related fields. This guide provides information about how to search for relevant materials and how to cite those materials in your coursework.
Scholarly Sources
Penn Libraries
Locate library resources by starting at the Penn Libraries website and use the Franklin Catalog, Franklin Articles+, or one of the many search databases available. To access full-text articles, from the upper right-hand corner of the Penn Libraries website, log in with your PennKey. You can then use the Franklin search bar to search for relevant terms.
Learn more about:
- Accessing Penn Libraries’ electronic resources on and off campus.
- The usage policy for Penn-only electronic resources.
- Browser requirements and troubleshooting for Penn Libraries’ electronic resources.
The Open Web and Freely Available Materials
To find scholarship on the open web, we recommend using:
- Google Scholar
Which indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of disciplines, including health sciences. Google Scholar allows you to search by author, title, journal, or keyword, and then narrow your results by date range. - PubMed Central (PMC)
A free database of full-text biomedical and life sciences journal literature, hosted by the National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine. PMC contains more than 6 million full-text records, including selections from the most prestigious journals. - Open access publications at:
Journalistic and Industry Publications
Good sources for industry news and high-quality journalism about health care and health policy include:
- BenefitsPRO, Health Affairs Blog, Kaiser Family Foundation, Kaiser Health News, and STAT News.
- The Atlantic, Forbes, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Vox.
Use Penn Libraries’ overview of grey literature to find reports, preprints, white papers, and other materials disseminated by government, industry, and advocacy organizations.
Citing Sources
AMA and APA bibliographic styles are most common in health and health care, but you may format your bibliography in any widely recognized format. Below are links to the Purdue Online Writing Lab’s guides to several common bibliographic styles:
- American Medical Association (AMA)
- American Psychological Association (APA)
- Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS)
- Modern Language Association (MLA)
You may choose to keep track of your bibliography manually or use citation management software like Zotero. Citation management software allows users to export a references list in a wide variety of formats.
Plagiarism
If you present someone's words, thoughts or data as your own, you are committing plagiarism—you are stealing. The location of the information is irrelevant: when it comes to plagiarism, information from the Internet is equivalent to information from a physical book or journal. To avoid plagiarism, you must cite the original author every time you:
- Use an author's exact written or spoken words. In this case, you must also identify the words by enclosing them with quotation marks or indenting the quote on both sides of the margin.
- Paraphrase someone's written or spoken words
- Use facts provided by someone else that are not common knowledge.
- Make significant use of someone's ideas or theories.
It is also plagiarism to pay a person or Internet service for a paper, hand in someone else's paper as your own, or cut and paste text from the Internet to your paper without citing the source.
For more information please see Penn's full code of Academic Integrity via the Pennbook web page.