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Physical Therapy

This research guide is created specifically for Physical Therapy Courses and topics such as Manual Therapy, Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation. It will help with library resources like finding articles, using databases, and much more!

Search Tips and Tutorials

Video tutorials

Scholarly versus Popular

Keep in mind that not all information is created equal. You can use the image below to remind you of the differences.

Scholarly versus popular. Scholarly info has: expert author, references, charts graphs, longer length, no ads objective and unbiased. Popular information has: non-expert author, no references, photos only, short length, ads and could be biased.

Connecting terms

Boolean operators AND            OR         NOT

                                            AND=both/all      OR=any        NOT=exclude

Truncation/Wild Cards

Truncation symbol, [an asterisk (*), dollar sign ($), or plus sign (+), etc.], with the root/stem of a word broadens your search to include various wording endings:

child*=child or children or childhood

Wildcard symbol may also be used to replace a single character to include different spellings:

wom?n for women or woman

Databases use different symbols so check the searching help.