Argumentative Syntheses
- Argumentative syntheses seek to bring sources together to make an argument.
- Involves looking for relationships between sources and drawing conclusions.
- Don’t force a relationship between sources if there isn’t one.
- Do your best to highlight the relationships between sources in very clear ways.
- It’s important to take note of other perspectives
Finding evidence to support your position
To find peer-reviewed articles to help inform your position, you should branch out and search broadly on your topic in different databases:
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PubMed
PubMed is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's (NLM®) database of biomedical citations and abstracts. It includes MEDLINE, which covers over 4,800 journals published in the United States and more than 70 other countries primarily from 1966 to the present.
Open Access
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Business Source Ultimate (EBSCO)
Business Source Ultimate provides full text for more than 7,200 scholarly business journals and other sources. Coverage includes virtually all subject areas related to business. BSU provides full text (PDF) for more than 350 of the top scholarly journals dating as far back as 1922.
Permitted Use | Subscribed multi-user unlimited access | Fulltext: 1922 - present. Abstracts and indexing: 1984 - present
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Sociological Abstracts (ProQuest)
Sociological Abstracts "covers the world's literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behaviorial sciences."
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Academic Search Premier (EBSCO)
Academic Search Premier is a multidisciplinary resource that "provides journal coverage for most academic areas of studies."
Permitted Use | eResources record | Subscribed multi-user unlimited access | Full text: 1990 - present. I
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SocINDEX with Full Text (EBSCO)
SocINDEX with Full Text is the world's most comprehensive and highest-quality sociology research database. Its extensive scope and content provide users with a wealth of extremely useful information encompassing the broad spectrum of sociological study. The database features more than 2.1 million records with subject headings from a 20,000+ term sociological thesaurus designed by subject experts and expert lexicographers. SocINDEX with Full Text contains full text for 890 journals dating back to 1908. This database also includes full text for more than 850 books and monographs, and full text for over 16,800 conference papers.
Permitted Use | Subscribed multi-user unlimited access | 1908-Current
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PsycINFO (American Psychological Association; APA - EBSCO)
PsycINFO is an abstracting and indexing database of more than 2000 journals (approximately 3.3 million records) devoted to peer-reviewed literature (journals, books and dissertations) in the behavioural sciences and mental health.
Permitted Use | Subscribed multi-user unlimited access | 1887-Current
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Scopus
Scopus, a multidisciplinary online resource, will be invaluable to students and faculty in various fields of study within the sciences, health sciences and the social sciences. Scopus offers full-text linking, abstracting-and-indexing information including peer-reviewed titles from international publishers, Open Access journals, conference proceedings, trade publications, quality web sources.
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CINAHL with Full Text (Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature - EBSCO)
CINAHL with Full Text is the world's most comprehensive source of full text for nursing & allied health journals, providing full text for more than 500 journals indexed in CINAHL. This authoritative file contains full text for many of the most used journals in the CINAHL index - with no embargo. With full-text coverage dating back to 1981, CINAHL with Full Text is the definitive research tool for all areas of nursing and allied health literature.
Permitted Use | Subscribed multi-user unlimited access | 1981-Current
Statistics and data
You may also want to include some statistics and data to help provide context for or to support your position. Try to ensure you've found the most current information, which may involve checking multiple sources.
Statista is another credible resource UNB Libraries subscribes to help you find statistics/data on health and health systems from different countries:
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Statista : the portal for statistics
Statista is a multidisciplinary database that aggregates information covering 80,000 topics. Access to data from over 18,000 sources covering 1.5 million statistics. All statistics can be directly downloaded in PNG, PDF, Excel, and PowerPoint formats. Data prepared according to academic citation standards, with a citation tool (APA, Chicago, Harvard, MLA, and Bluebook) and links to the original source for further research. Statista also covers industry reports, studies, forecasts, dossiers, digital market outlook , aesthetically pleasing infographics, and more.
Subscribed multi-user unlimited access
Within Statista you can try the following:
- Keyword search in the general search box (example: Canada health)
- Look under Reports > Countries > Filter by Country then check out the dossier for that country
- Search under Statistics > All industries > Health, Pharm, Medtech > State of Health > Global health for other types of information
Finding grey literature
Grey Literature is “information produced on all levels of government, academia, business and industry in electronic and print formats not controlled by commercial publishing, i.e. where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body.” (International Conference on Grey Literature) . This type of information can be incredibly useful to help support your journal articles and other statistics and data you may use to support your position.
Advanced Google searching to find grey literature - here are some tips on how to "google" for grey literature
| Limit by file type |
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| Limit by domain |
- Education institutions (US-based) .edu
- Non- commercial organizations .org
- US federal, state, county, municipal governments .gov
- https://gnb.ca
- https:/canada.ca
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| Limit by region |
- Select a specific country (Canada, US, UK, Australia are great for health grey literature)
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| Quick terms to try with your topic |
- Reports, statistics, rates, data, association, government, evaluation, evidence, framework, guideline, policy, review, strategy, toolkit, white paper
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