Physical Therapist Assistant

Physical Therapist Assistant (PTA) Program

Off Campus Access

Current students, faculty, and staff can access electronic library resources off campus, it’s easy!  When prompted, just enter your MCC username and password and you’re all set to explore your selected resource. 

Physical Therapist Assistant

MEDLINE Tutorial

This tutorial demonstrates the features of the MEDLINE database on the EBSCOhost interface, including basic searching and narrowing results on the result list. Please note while MEDLINE Ultimate is used in the demonstration, most of the tutorial also applies to MEDLINE with Full-Text. 

Anatomy of a Scholarly Article

Lakeland Community College. (2014). Anatomy of a Scholarly Article [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/3nLOA7c9ERc

How to ask a clinical question using PICO (Patient-Intervention-Comparison- Outcome) format

This video tutorial describes how to ask a clinical question about the effects of a physiotherapy intervention in PICO (Patient - Intervention - Comparison - Outcome) format.

How to Ask a Clinical Question Using PICO format by The George Institute for Global Health,  University of Sidney, Copyright © 2016 The George Institute.

How to Perform a PEDro Simple Search

This video tutorial describes how to do a simple search on the Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro).

 How to Perform a PEDro Simple Search by The George Institute for Global Health,  University of Sidney, Copyright © 2016 The George Institute.

PEDro Advanced Searching 

This video tutorial describes how to do an advanced search using PEDro.

PEDro Advanced Searching by The George Institute for Global Health,  University of Sidney, Copyright © 2016 The George Institute.

PubMed - Need the Full Text Article?

A tutorial on how to get full text articles for PubMed citations, both free and for a fee by the NIH U.S. National Library of Medicine

Using MeSH in PubMed

Basic Search

PubMed is a great place to start for health, science, and psychology research. Narrow your search to clinical trials or by using the Medical Subject Heading (MeSH).

First, try out a search in PubMed using keywords related to your topic to find relevant results, then focus your search using filters on the left side of the search results page, such as the publication date and article type:

 

Don't see a filter you want to use? Use the Additional Filters to customize PubMed for your research!

1. Click on the additional filters button to add more filter options for article type, species, language, sex, subject, journal, and age. 

2. Check the filters you want to add, then click Show.

3. Now, you'll have those options on your search results page. Check a box to apply that filter to your results. 

Abstract View

Once you've found an article you're interested in reading, click on the title to go to the abstract view

On this page, use the tools on the right to save or email the article and find the full article as a PDF using the full text links. Use the page navigation to skip to a section on the abstract view, such as similar and cited by articles and a list of tags for the article, including MeSH terms. 

Search in PubMed often? You can create a free MyNCBI account to save and organize articles in one place, add custom search filters, and view your search history. 

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)

Search the MeSH controlled vocabulary thesaurus to find and use medical subject headings in PubMed.

Most articles in PubMed include a list of Medical Subject Headings or MeSH terms. This is a standardized way of tagging what an article is about regardless of what specific keywords or terms are used in the article.

1. Start with a relevant article. Look at the MeSH terms section for ideas on relevant MeSH terms you might use!

2. Click on the term and Search in PubMed to find all articles with that tag, or Add to Search to use the term in a search with other MeSH terms or keywords. 

You can also search for MeSH terms using the MeSH thesaurus to view more details about the term and add terms to the PubMed search builder.