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Gerstein Science Information Centre

Indigenous Health Resources

Searching for Indigenous Community Resources

In order to find Indigenous Community/Indigenous Studies resources (which is referred to as Grey Literature in Health Science discourse), consider the following options:

Consider using the suggested methods of Google Advanced searching below, to identify more Indigenous Community Health Resources.

STEP 1 - BRAINSTORM RELEVANT COMMUNITIES / STAKEHOLDERS / ORGANIZATIONS

  1. Search topic in Google and look through first 5-10 pages for relevant Indigenous health authorities, organizations or communities.
    • Look at who publishes and/or stores relevant document
  2. Ask research team members for suggested organizations
  3. Browse the grey literature library page for sources of grey literature
  4. Use the below honeycomb to brainstorm potential authorities, organizations, or stakeholders relevant to your topic          

STEP 2 – SEARCH & DOCUMENTATION STRATEGIES

Combine your concepts (with AND) and synonyms (with OR) using boolean operators as applicable.

Consider searching in a variety of locations :

  • Targeted Website Browsing/Searching (aka GO to the website)
  • Advanced Google Targeted website searching
  • Grey Literature Database Search (eg. iPortal)
  • Search Engine Searching (eg. Google or DuckDuck Go)

 Track your searches! For example searched [name of website & URL] with [search query combinations] on [date] located [relevant items located/ searched not relevant/ results may be of interest]

Advanced Google

Use Advanced Search in Google

screenshot of advanced google

Look at the "Get More Out of Google" infographic** for the full details

Optimize your Google Searches:

1. Combine keywords with boolean

  • OR: pull results that include either word [Indigenous or Native or Aboriginal]

 

2. Use quotation marks ( " " ) to search for phrases

  • Use around a phrase of two or more words ["Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls", "MMIWG"]

 

3. Search a specific website rather than the entire Internet using site:

  • Get results from certain sites or domains [site:https://www.nwac.ca/]
  • To get results from multiple sites or domains, combine with OR [site:https://www.nwac.ca/ OR site:http://nwrct.ca/]

 

4. Search for terms in location on webpage (intitle:)

  • Use intitle:term to restrict search results to documents containing term in the title.
  • For example, [intitle:Violence] will return documents that mention the word “addiction” in their titles

 

5. Search for particular types of documents (filetype:)

  • Specify the file type that your require (ex. pdf.) and be sure that this is no space between colon and file type [filetype:pdf]

Example search:

"Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women" (site:http://www.nwac.ca OR site:http://www.nwrct.ca/) filetype:pdf