How to Research Medical Journals

If you or a loved one has been diagnosed with a life-changing illness, you may wonder about treatments that are available or under study that may change the course of the disease. Even for relatively simple diseases like the common cold, you may be interested in how to research medical journals if you want to see what's new in the field.

Instructions

• 1

  To search any type of journal, the best search is the Google Scholar search. This will take you directly to reputable articles that have been peer-reviewed. To get to Google Scholar, locate the line of text at the top of your Google window that says, "Web Images Maps News Video Gmail More" and click on "More." From the drop-down list that appears, click on "Scholar."

• 2

  In the search box, enter some keywords about the condition you wish to research, for example, "impotence treatment" or "breast cancer alternative therapy." Press the "enter" key on your keyboard or click on the "search" button on your screen.

• 3

  From the list of articles that appears, choose those that seem most relevant to your needs and click on the line of blue text at the top of each article summary. Google will take you to a brief summary of the article.

• 4

  Your list will include all articles Google can find. Some may be seriously outdated. To get only the most recent information, click on "recent articles" on the green bar toward the top of the screen. If you want, you can specify the earliest year with which you want to start. If you don't select a year, Google will return articles from the most recent 5-year period.

• 5

  When you are researching medical journals, you are likely to find that most articles cannot be read in their entirety unless you pay a fee. However, different sites give different amounts of information before a fee is required. On your Google listing, at the bottom of each article summary, there is usually a line that says "see all x versions." Click on this link to see if any of the other versions will give you more information for free.