Nutrition Research


This page has been prepared for students enrolled in the Nutrition courses at the College of St. Benedict / Saint John's University.


Contents:

Web Sites

(Note! Not everything on the web is accurate, and this is especially true of information related to nutrition. See Quackwatch and the National Council Against Health Fraud. And see also Internet Information Remains Unhealthy from Nutrition News Focus, which gives some hints for finding reliable nutrition web sites. Evaluating a Source: Some Questions to Ask also gives general guidelines.)

See the links on the Quick Reference: Health and Medicine, Internet Resources for Nutrition or the Internet Resources for Nursing pages.

If you need statistics, the CDC Search page retrieves health and disease data from the Center for Disease Control and the National Center for Health Statistics.

If you are looking for the latest nutrition news, try:

Note: For help in citing material you find on web sites, use the links on our Citing Sources page.

General Sources

Depending on your topic and your own knowledge about it, you may want to find an overview. An overview can help you narrow your topic, put it in context within its discipline, and identify "classic" research. Encyclopedias are usually excellent sources for overviews. Use these links, or ask a reference librarian for help.

  • Britannica Online - a college-level encyclopedia, always a good place to start. If you are off-campus, you can use our proxy server or use the free version at Britannica.com instead.
  • Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine, CSB Reference RC 41 .G35 1999
  • Encyclopaedia of Food Science, Food Technology and Nutrition - CSB Reference TX 349 .E47 1993, an 8-volume set. London ; San Diego: Academic Press, c1993.
  • Encyclopedia of Human Nutrition is available online or in print, CSB Reference QP 141 .E526 1999, a 3-volume set. The index for the complete print set is duplicated in each volume. San Diego: Academic Press, c1999.  The online version is available free for 48 hours to guests who register, as is the Encyclopedia of Food Microbiology.
  • Encyclopedia of Human Biology, CSB Reference QP 11 .E53 1991, an 8-volume set, the last volume of which is the index. San Diego: Academic Press, c1991.
  • Access Science  is the online version of the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology.
  • The Annual Review of Nutrition provides an overview of research in the field of nutrition. 1984 to the present is available online; Clemens Library also has all of the volumes, 1981 to the present, CSB QP 141 .A1 A64.
  • Cambridge World History of Food - CSB Reference TX 353 .C255 2000, a 2-volume set. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, c2000. Just one of many reference works on food in the libraries.

You can also get overviews and encyclopedia articles from the A.D.A.M. Health Illustrated Encyclopedia available from MedlinePlus.

Overviews are, of course, also available in books. Use our online catalog, MnPALS, which can be set to access the CSB/SJU, St. Cloud State, and University of Minnesota library catalogs. You can also search many of the other libraries in Minnesota on WebPALS.  Use Interlibrary Loan to request those not here. WorldCat can take you even farther, to other catalogs in the U. S. and abroad.

Indexes & Journals

Note: You will find more in the Indexes & Journals section of the CSB/SJU Internet Resources for Nutrition page.

  • To find citations to articles in the broad field of medicine, including nutrition, use MEDLINE via the National Library of Medicine's PubMed (powerful, yet user-friendly). You can also go to MedlinePlus, MEDLINE access designed for the layperson, to access MEDLINE, online medical dictionaries and directories, and a host of other NLM/NIH databases. Or you can search several NLM databases simultaneously via the NLM Gateway.
  • To find articles so recent that they don't yet appear in MEDLINE and other indexes, you can do keyword searches of the titles and abstracts in Current Contents.
  • CINAHL - CINAHL Plus with Full Text provides indexing for 3,024 journals from the fields of nursing and allied health, with indexing back to 1937. There is the full text 337 of journals, plus legal cases, clinical innovations, critical paths, drug records, research instruments and clinical trials.
  • Our Nursing Abstracts and Indexes list includes some other indexes that might be useful, too, including ProQuest Nursing Journals, comprised of 280+ full text nursing journals.
  • Science Citation Index, part of the Web of Science, covers the fields of chemistry, mathematics, medicine, biology, engineering and physics. The citation index shows you how many times and in what publications a certain author or journal article has been cited within the literature. There is also a general search option that allows users to search by title, author, or subject.
  • And you might have a go at LexisNexis Academic, which has a section for General Medical & Health Topics, and includes some full text sources.

Check the Journal Finder to see which articles you can find in our libraries, in print or online.

For things we don't have or can't access here, submit ILL requests using the form on the Interlibrary Loan page. There is no charge for this service.  (Remember that interlibrary loan can be as quick as overnight or as long as three weeks.)

Writing Your Paper and Citing Your Sources

Along the way, you might like to use our Assignment Calculator, with useful links to help on choosing a topic, writing a thesis, evaluating sources, avoiding plagiarism, etc.  And, for your bibliography and footnotes, use Peggy's APA Citation Style: Examples for Nursing Students page, the library's Citing Sources page, or the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, CSB & SJU Reference BF 76.7 .P83, for print sources.

 

     

Clemens Library / Alcuin Library
Copyright © 2003 College of Saint Benedict | Saint John's University
All rights reserved.
Comments to Peggy Roske.
Last updated: June 29, 2006. Links checked: January 23, 2006.