CST Exam Prep, Association of Surgical Technologists
The Certified Surgical Technologist (CST®) examination covers the knowledge and skills common to competent entry-level Surgical Technologists in varied settings and geographical locations.
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.
There are two important steps to take when searching for research articles in an academic database.
Step 1: Keywords are the main ideas represented in your research topic or question and/or the main words you would use to describe the topic to another person.
Example:
|
Children |
Diet Soda |
Weight Gain |
|
adolescent |
low calorie soda |
obesity |
|
youths |
diet beverage |
overweight |
|
minors |
diet pop |
increased body mass |
Step 2: Once you've determined the keywords, combine them in the database using the Boolean operator AND to narrow your search results. Essentially you're "telling" the database to retrieve only those documents or records containing both words or phrases; for example "online programs" AND "student success;" or the keywords "endangered" AND "birds". The more terms added to the search, the narrower the results will be.
Boolean image obtained from The Boolean Machine courtesy Rockwell Shrock
For example successful keyword search phrases relating to surgical technology may include:
Example search using MEDLINE
Lakeland Community College. (2014). Anatomy of a Scholarly Article [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/3nLOA7c9ERc
Anatomy of a Research Article by CSUDH Library is licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Surgical Technology for the Surgical Technologist by 
Study Guide with Lab Manual for the Association of Surgical Technologists' by 
Alexander's Surgical Procedures by 
Pharmacology for the Surgical Technologist by
PubMed is a free web-based interface for searching MEDLINE.
PubMed Homepage
Below is an image of a PubMed article record. Labels were added to explain the information that PubMed provides about the article:
Remember: PubMed does NOT include the full-text of articles in its database--it links out to them. PubMed only searches the information about the article(including title and abstract), not the full-text of the article.
SAMPLE ABSTRACT FROM PUBMED
Advantages include:
Click on the Log In button as it as appears below, in the top right of the page
You may Log in using a variety of different methods, including your Google login (I used my personal Google account). Or you can also select "New here? Sign up" at the bottom of the login page.
PubMed - Need the Full Text Article?
Use MeSH to Build a Better PubMed Query
This tutorial shows how to build a targeted PubMed search starting in the MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) database. It includes very brief background on MeSH terms and indexing by NIH U. S. National Library of Medicine.
MEDLINE provides comprehensive indexing for publications in the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, pre-clinical sciences, and much more. MEDLINE uses MeSH, a controlled vocabulary or medical subject heading list created by the National Library of Medicine.
This three minute tutorial demonstrates the features of the MEDLINE database on the EBSCOhost interface, including basic searching and narrowing results on the results list.
The Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) indexes and abstracts articles from nearly 800 nursing, biomedical, and consumer health journals, as well as publications of the American Nurses Association and the National League for Nursing. This tutorial demonstrates the basic searching features of the suite of CINAHL databases on EBSCO.
