Give the topic some thought and develop a basic understanding. Reference resources are useful for doing this preliminary work.
When explaining a topic the more detail provided the better. What are the specific focal points of the topic that will be covered in the health fair presentation? Refer to the rubric in order to help determine subtopics. The more thoroughly the topic is described the easier it will be to identify relevant resources.
Here is an example for the topic vaccinations:
My group is going to explain what vaccines are and how they work. We are going to address vaccine schedules and what diseases can be prevented by vaccinating. More specifically, why vaccinating might be of particular importance to college students. Because vaccine safety has been a topic of concern we will also add that to our presentation. Statistics will be used to support our information. Finally we will add a section about where to get vaccinated in the Valley.
When searching for resources try a variety of key terms in order to retrieve a range of relevant and useful results.
For example, if researching the topic vaccination it would be best to search on synonyms, broader terms, narrower terms and related terms as well. This includes but is not limited to:
A site search is very helpful when a researcher finds a useful website to focus on. For example, searching for information from Nursing World in order to obtain a nursing perspective on a topic.
Please note the asterisk (*) command does not work to locate all the variations of a root in Google. But researchers can use the word OR to search on the variations at one time or words that might be used in place of each other.
One of the most helpful commands in Google narrows results to statistics about a particular topic. These can be formatted in a couple of different ways using the tilde (~).
Also, if searching using a phrase you’ll want to use quotation marks (" ") to keep it intact. Quotation marks around a single word instructs Google that the word must be included in results.
Finally, AND does not need to be used for combining terms in Google since that is the search default when using multiple words.
Evaluation format:
Team member name & resource title: 2 evaluating the resource; 1 point about how it might be incorporated into the presentation. Complete sentences should be used.
Example points:
DeNoon, D. J. (2011, January). Autism/MMR vaccine study faked: FAQ facts behind journal's claim that autism study was hoax. WebMD. http://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/news/20110105/bmj-wakefield-autism-faq
Author - DeNoon is an highly regarded medical journalist. Also, the article is reviewed by an MD. I feel much more confident about this piece since there are links to full bios for both the author and reviewer.
Publisher - I am concerned about the commercialism of WebMD. The webpages have lots of advertisement links. How does everyone else feel about this?
Date - Is there something a little more current on the subject? For the medical field 2011 seems a bit too dated. Especially for the topic of vaccine risks which strikes fear in people and as a result has the potential to wreak havoc on public healthcare.
Audience - Is WebMD an acceptable source for our purpose since it is a resource used by the general population? Would we do a better job representing our competence and skill as future nurses by using a professional resource? Or by using this resource are we potentially introducing our health consumer audience to a leading and highly accessible medical website? What are everyone else's thoughts?
Poster resources
How to Create a Research Poster, NYU Libraries (this is moreso for student qualitative or quantitative research presentations but the presentation tips are helpful)
Image sources
Search for images using Creative Commons or Flickr Creative Commons
Citing images, tables & figures
All guides are available under the CC-BY-NC-SA license.
