This guide was created to help PA students get started with their research. It highlights popular resources from the library collection that are relevant to PA projects and classes.
The library homepage contains a more comprehensive set of resources than this guide. Our homepage can easily be found by entering D'Youville Library into your favorite search engine.
There is no central login for the library. The library's digital collection consists of dozens of databases from various publishers. Each database requires "authentication" for off-campus access. The authentication process uses your DYU network login (the same one used for DYU email and Canvas).
Email us at library@dyc.edu with any questions you may have about research, database access, our collection or services. We check the email regularly during office hours (8:30 am to 4:30 pm, Monday - Friday). Schedule a research assistance meeting using our online booking calendar for more in-depth help with your assignments.
D'Yousearch searches across the library's collection and includes information from the library catalog and various databases. It provides an expansive search of topics and formats in an easy to use interface.
Like the search engine, Google Scholar provides results from publishers across the Internet. It limits the results to "scholarly" publications. Most of the results come from academic journals, but some results may be from books. Not all results will include free full text, but it can be linked to the library collection to increase full text availability.
Below is a short tutorial with step by step instructions for linking Google Scholar to the D'Youville Library collection.
Library databases contain specialized information that focus on specific subjects or formats. They provide targeted access to scholarly materials. They are curated by subject experts and contain information that is relevant to the field. They often have advanced search features for more precise searching.
Below are some of our most popular resources for the PA program. We have also included links to the our complete database collection and those specific to PA.
CINAHL Ultimate is the new definitive resource for nursing and allied health research, providing full text for more of the most used journals in the CINAHL index than any other database. It covers more than 50 nursing specialties and includes quick lessons, evidence-based care sheets, CEU modules and research instruments.
Refworks is a web based citation management tool to help researchers collect, organize, manage and cite their research sources. Refworks is available free to D'Youville students courtesy of the library.
Our Refworks Overview page contains information on the how and why of using this software as well as details for creating an account. Below is a short video to provide some information about the value of Refworks.
While generative AI tools such ChatGPT and Microsoft copilot can be useful for some parts of the research process, they are not very good at finding scholarly journal articles.
They are prone to fabricating cited material. We do not recommend using these types of AI for finding journal articles.
There are some specialized AI tools for this type of research though. One of the most popular of these tools is Semantic Scholar. It contains information about millions of scholarly journal articles and has several features to help you focus your searches and evaluate search results.
We have created a list of useful AI research tools. Many of them are not good at finding journal articles, but can be used for other parts of the research process such as writing or evaluating information.
Our Interlibrary Loan service allows you to borrow articles, books and other materials we don't have from libraries across North America. You already have an account for this free service, just use the ILL link to get to our request form .
Fill in the form as best you can, the more information we have the better. We process requests during business hours - Monday through Friday. Article requests usually take from 1 to 4 business days.
