This page provides a summary of the Library resources and research tools I hope you will find useful for your Photovoice and Infographic Assignments.
Questions? Feel free to contact Celia Brinkerhoff, Health Science/Biology Librarian Celia.Brinkerhoff@kpu.ca
Your instructor has given you examples of health infographics. Here are a couple more sources to look at for inspiration. Click on the images below to see examples from the Public Health Agency of Canada and American Public Health Association.
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The following are a few of the many infographic creation tools. Most are free for the first several infographics.
This comparison may be helpful for choosing the tool that works best for you.
The following are sources for free images that you can use in your projects. Always make sure you can verify the terms of use (copyright) before using. It is good practice to credit the source of your images, regardless of whether they were freely available on the web. Attribution is always nice!
For more details on how you can use images in your presentations, see the Images page of the Library's Copyright Guide.
Consider putting a Creative Commons License on your finished product so that others are permitted to use it. You determine the level of restrictions: leave it completely open, ask for some attribution (credit), or allow others to adapt, modify, and reuse.
See Creative Commons for full details on various licenses, and the benefits of applying one to your work.
An annotated bibliography is a list of sources you will be using in your presentation. It will include an APA-style reference for each source, arranged alphabetically according to the authors' names, as you would normally do for a reference list.
However, below each entry you will also include a paragraph telling your reader something about the article and how it relates to your own research topic. Working through an annotated bibliography is usually done as part of the researching and writing of a larger project; it's also good practice in reading scientific articles and learning to summarize and evaluate them in terms of your own research. Learning how to critically read scientific information and integrating it with your own writing is a crucial skill for communicating in the sciences.
See the example below of an annotation of an article from American Journal of Public Health.
Annotated Bibliography Entry in APA (7th ed.)
The above example is from: Graves, R. (n.d.). Nursing 494 Annotated Bibliography Scholarly Paper, [PDF]. https://sites.ualberta.ca/~graves1/documents/Nursing494.pdf
Guidelines vary on how long your annotations should be, but in general 3-5 well-organized sentences should be enough to convey the most important information. You will probably write something in the range of 150-200 words.
But what should be included?
At a minimum, your notes should provide:
Tip: Check with your instructor for more specific instructions on formatting and content of annotations.
Here's a quick video that will outline the major points to consider when writing an annotated bibliography.
Still have some questions about how to write an annotated bibliography? The following links should help you find your answers.
For this assignment, you are asked to use at least one peer-reviewed journal article.
These articles often provide the kind of academic, high quality information you need to bring evidence and data to your assignment.
The following short video from NCSU Library to find out what peer-reviewed articles are and why they are such an important information source.
For this assignment, you are asked to include at least one scholarly, academic book/ebook as a source of information.
Keep in mind these criteria to help you judge whether a book is high-quality enough to use.
Is the author an expert?
Are there cited sources?
Who is the Publisher?
Is the Writing Specialized?
Adapted from Is my book scholarly? by Sigrid Kargut, KPU Library.
In addition to searching the scholarly, peer-reviewed literature for sources on your topic, you will also want to search another important source: grey literature.
Grey literature includes reports and results of research published by organizations and various levels of government. For more information on how to access this material, see the Grey Literature and Statistics page of this guide.
The following checklist activity is based on Evaluating Internet Health Information: A Tutorial, from MedlinePlus and the National Library of Medicine.
Click the arrows below to expand the description. Consider these criteria when determining the quality of health information you find online, and in the library's collection.
Use the library's main search box to locate books/ebooks, research documents, and more. This is a good way to start research on your topic.
Start with a few keywords that describe the health topic and target population you are investigating.
For example: "food security" AND college students
From the set of initial results, use the filters and limits on the left to narrow your results by content, date, or discipline
This short video will introduce you to finding sources in the Library's collection.
Try Canada Commons Public Document search to find grey literature on your topic. Recall this is evidence-based information from NGOs, think tanks, policy groups, and various levels of government.
This video demonstrates combining searches for a more focussed set of results.
Search Medline on the OVID platform using MeSH. Thanks to UBC Library for these videos. View the complete playlist for searching OVID Medline.
PubMed searching, from the National Library of Medicine. Some videos are interactive tutorials highlighting specific database features.
There are many ways to access health information on the Statistics Canada site. Starting with some of these basic tools will provide you with a quick overview of your topic.
Keep in mind that most health data is the responsibility of Statistics Canada. The following link searches Statistics Canada by Province. Use the filters on the left to locate by subject.
The links below are to BC specific statistical sources.
Refer to the Library's APA citation style guide for examples of properly formatted references. The links below will take you directly to the page providing details for each type of source.
You will also need to note data sources for any figures, graphs, etc. that you include in your infographic. Whether you create the figures using data from another source, or you incorporate a figure from somewhere else, you still need to let your readers know where the information came from.
See the Tables, figures and images tab on the library's APA guide for details.
APA does not provide clear guidance on how to cite statistical sources. If you are using data found in a report or journal article, you will cite that source. However, if you are using data directly from a collecting agency such as Statistics Canada or BC Stats, you will need to include all the information necessary to guide your reader to your source.
Statistics Canada has a page outlining how it would like users to cite its products.
See How to Cite Statistics Canada Products for full details.
Here is an example of citing data found in one of its tables:
The following online guides provide some tips for including information about your sources on your infographic. While APA does not explicitly say how to do this, make sure you clearly acknowledge where you are getting your data from. This will lend more credibility to your work, and allow your readers to follow up.
Time to practice. Work through the following exercises to review how to cite an article, report, and data. Refer to the links in the box above to see details on how to cite particular kinds of sources.