How can I change my approach when I can't find information on my topic

A student was looking for articles on state level policies that have successfully lowered the price of prescription medications.  Search using these keywords did not lead to useful results.  What can you do in this situation?

Answer

Adjust your search terms to find one related article: Use information in that article to find more details.

If you can adjust your search terms enough to find one article that is related to your topic, you can often use information in that article to lead you to more details. 

In this case, using "states" as a search term seems ineffective.  If there is an article on Maryland reducing prescription drug prices, you would need to search for "Maryland", and not "states", in order to find it.  If you happen to know of some examples, you can try those states first, but trying to search for all 50 is a bit unwieldy.

Here is what we did.

library search bar "states drug pricing"

We started by going to the library home page: http://library.ubalt.edu 
and entering the following in the library search [states "drug pricing"]

One article was entitled: States on the Front Line: Addressing America's Drug Pricing Problem.

and that sounded like it might give a good overview, we click on PDF Full Text to read the article.
Search result click on PDF full text to read document
 
In the introduction, the author mentions that the National Academy for State Health Policy created a website to track different state level drug pricing policies.  The URL in the article was a broken link, but Google search was able to turn up their website:
 
This website has a lot of helpful information on this topic.  For example, one can see that 18 states have passed what NASHP labels "transparency".  So now one can do a search for articles with the specific states listed and transparent drug pricing.  Or one can use other details about the specifics of the laws mentioned to find search terms that can be used to find scholarly journal articles and the texts of the state laws themselves.

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  • Last Updated Nov 06, 2020
  • Views 51
  • Answered By Michael Shochet

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