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FSN 301: Life Cycle Nutrition: Home

FSN 301 and the Library

Welcome FSN 301 students! This guide is intended to provide you with a narrowed list of library resources specific to your needs in this class. For a broader set of Food Science & Nutrition resources see the main guide for this subject.

The home page of this guide includes tips for Topic Selection, Database Selection, and Search Tips. Using the tabs at the top of this page you can navigate to a page with AMA citation style tips.

If you have any questions reach out to me directly at lindsay.decker@maine.edu.

Choosing a Topic

You can find inspiration for a topic anywhere as long as you can support your research with scholarly sources later on. So where can you look for inspiration on selecting a topic?

Consider your interests

Social media is a good place to look for current controversies in your field:

Scanning the Latest Articles sections of professional associations and publications:

Google

  • The topic of nutrition is rife with misinformation on the internet.
  • Use what you find on the open web for topic inspiration but use caution when determining what sources you can rely on and are acceptable to use in a college-level research paper.
  • If you have questions about a source's reliability, don't hesitate to reach out!

Finding Full Text

If need help getting the full text of a resource, never hesitate to reach out to your librarian at lindsay.decker@maine.edu. Below are some tools to help you access full text.

Finding Articles for your Literature Review

Here is a list of databases relevant to FSN 301. For all databases related to Food Science & Nutrition, go to the subject guide for the department. See the Search Tips box below for help navigating these databases.

Search Tips

Your assignment requires you to find "six original research articles" published between 2017 and 2022. Every database is different but they function similarly. It can be frustrating to do searches in a database and come up with articles you can't use. Here are some suggestions

Break your topic down into search terms

  • If the objective of your paper is "to identify if in-person diabetes self-management
    education is more effective at helping adults manage type 2 diabetes than self-
    directed online diabetes education" then some key words you might use are:
    • diabetes
    • type 2 diabetes
    • self-management education
    • in-person education
    • self-directed online education
    • online education
    • adults 

Start out with one search term, then add another, then exchange one term for a different one. Try different combinations of terms to get the most relevant to results to your topic. See the box below about using AND and OR in a database search.

Look for filters

  • Specify that you only want articles published between 2017-2022
  • You want original research. Filter by Document or Item Type for Journal or Scholarly Articles or Peer-Reviewed Articles.
    • Filter out News Articles and Reviews. Reviews can be helpful but they are not original research as defined by this assignment.

ANDs and ORs

Searching in databases means organizing your keywords with Boolean operators: AND, OR, and NOT

Use AND for more specific results
nutrition AND growth

Your results will include BOTH terms.

   AND narrows a search, finding only results containing both terms.

 

Use OR to broaden a search with related terms
nutrition OR growth

Your results will include EITHER term.

   OR expands a search, finding results containing either or both terms.

 

Mix and match: (dairy OR milk OR cheese) AND nutri*

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