For your final project you are asked to select a country and conduct research related to developing a health policy. You will need to look online and in the Walden University Library for articles and statistics to back up assertions in your paper.

The Walden University Library can help!  On this page you will find guidance on how to choose useful databases, identify good search terms related to the questions you need to address in your paper, and conduct effective searches. You will also find suggested government websites you can use for statistics.

Before you begin searching, pick out the main concepts from the assignment details. Good search terms will often be the nouns used in the prompts for what to include in your paper. In the case of this assignment, most of the key search terms are stated clearly, although you may need to adjust them to retrieve relevant results.

See our Keyword Searching guide to learn how to break a topic into keywords. You can also try some of these suggestions, focusing on appropriate combinations:

your selected country's name

Note: Instead of always searching with the name of your selected country, you may want to also try the applicable region or continent name to broaden the search. For example, if your country is Barbados, try Caribbean as well.

social determinants

health literacy

health knowledge

public policy

public opinion

culture or cultural

disparities

morbidity or mortality

life expectancy

inequality or inequity

program

Recommended databases for scholarly literature on this topic cross a range of disciplines from the medical sciences to the social and political sciences. You may need to use more than one database to find all the research literature you need.

Explore various databases by subject by visiting the Library homepage and using the Subject Resources box.

Subject areas that may be of interest include Health sciences, Nursing, Human services, Public Policy & Administration, and Social Work.

The strategy below will search to find scholarly literature published in peer-reviewed journals on one of the components of your final paper: the social determinants of health in the country you selected.

For this search example, let's use the country of Nigeria.

This search example uses the database CINAHL Plus with Full Text.

Note: Learn how to access CINAHL Plus with Full Text.

1. Once you are in the CINAHL Plus with Full Text database, enter your keywords in the search boxes.

First search box, enter the country name. For this example:

Nigeria

Second search box:

social determinants

Third search box:

health

Your search boxes will look like this:

2. Below the search boxes, under Limit your results, click the boxes under Full Text and Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals.

3. Click on the Search button to run your search.

4. You should now have a list of scholarly peer-reviewed articles on your topic. To open an article, click on the PDF Full Text link.

You will need to try several searches like the one above using different keywords for all the components of your final project to make sure you have enough scholarly literature to support your assertions. Try searching inside other databases as well.

Test yourself:

To find life expectancy data as well as statistics for diseases in a specific country, search the Global Health Observatory (GHO) website:

1. Go to the Global Health Observatory (GHO) website.

2. Click Country statistics on the left.

3. Choose your selected country from the alphabetical listing.

4. Explore the data available under Country data and statistics.

Also try our custom search box on the Statistics & Data guide using the Statistics combined search box.