Welcome to the Medical Terminology Guide!
If you have questions or comments about this guide, please contact Emily Gilbert, Librarian for the School of Health Sciences, or Anna Phan, Learning Services Coordinator for the School of Health Sciences.
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To find a complete list of library resources (dictionary and encyclopedia entries, eBooks, and articles), use the resources introduced on the Research page.
Below is a sampling of e-resources. To access, simply click on them.
School of Health Sciences Guide Research Page:
Are you confused about prefixes, roots, and suffixes?
Check out these great resources for lists, tips, and practice!
Flashcards are a fabulous way to test your knowledge and identify where you may need additional practice. For tips on how to create and effectively use flashcards, watch the quick 10-minute video below. For resources to create your own flashcards, click here or check out the links below the video.
Mobile Apps
Course Project: Patient Chart
In Modules 02-05, you will be presented with one component of a patient’s medical record. You will be exploring the medical terminology used in these documents and will be asked to interpret the meanings of various words and abbreviations.
In Module 06, we will put these components together and examine a full medical record. You will learn to navigate an entire medical record and will practice finding reliable and valid resources to help you understand terms that may not be familiar to you.
Documentation, the recording of a patient's condition, treatment and response to treatment, is one of the most basic patient care skills. Because accurate documentation is important, both legally and professionally, knowing how to write in medical records is as important as knowing what to record.
Link to the APA Guide.
Link to the NoodleTools Guide.
Link to the Tutor Match Answer (use Tutor Match to get help with finding abbreviations, definitions, doing APA, and/or using NoodleTools...use the linked Answer to figure out how to use Tutor Match to set up a tutoring session).
In your assignments, you are asked to list your research sources. The APA Guide shows you the proper format to list your sources. Our library databases provide APA-formatted citations that you can use for your references page. To learn more, watch the two-minute video below.
Discussion posts and replies serve as an opportunity for you to communicate your thoughts about what you are learning in your course. Your audience is your instructor and your peers.
View the Writing Guide for help with writing discussion posts: http://guides.rasmussen.edu/writing/discussion
Ideally the posts you write should prove you are thinking critically about the content of the course and should highlight and expand upon what is being taught in the course.
When writing a discussion post:
You will need to give credit to the sources that you used to gather information.
The handout attached below will provide you tips on how to create strong discussion posts.
Other tips:
Healthcare Career Matchmaker
The Healthcare Career Matchmaker works through an interactive interface. On a sliding scale from 1 to 10 where 1 equals “not at all,” and 10 equals “very,” students can choose how the some traits reflect their personalities. This app provides 56 healthcare careers based on data from the U.S. Department of Labor. With quick assessment tool, you can reflect your own personality traits and find best Healthcare matches.
Health Sciences Careers
Explore careers under Healthcare field and specific resources designated towards different programs we offer.
Boolean Operators connect keywords or concepts logically to retrieve relevant articles, books, and other resources. There are three Boolean Operators:
Using AND
Example: The result list will include resources that include both keywords -- "distracted driving" and "texting" -- in the same article or resource, represented in the shaded area where the circles intersect (area shaded in purple).
Using OR
Example: The result list will include resources that include the keyword "texting" OR the keyword "cell phone" (entire area shaded in blue); either is acceptable.
Using NOT
Example: The result list will include all resources that includes the term "car" (green area) but will exclude any resource that includes the term "motorcycle" (purple area) even though the term car may be present in the resource.
A library database searches for keywords throughout the entire resource record including the full-text of the resource, subject headings, tags, bibliographic information, etc.
Keywords:
Example: The keyword list above was developed to find resources that discuss how texting while driving results in accidents. Notice that there are synonyms (texting and "text messaging"), related terms ("cell phones" and texting), and spelling variations ("cell phone" and cellphone). Using keywords when searching full-text requires consideration of various words that express an idea or concept.
Subject Headings
Example 1: In EBSCO's Academic Search Complete, clicking on the "Subject Terms" tab provides access to the entire subject heading list used in the database. It also allows a search for specific subject terms.
Example 2: A subject term can be incorporated into a keyword search by clicking on the down arrow next to "Select a Field" and selecting "Subject Terms" from the dropdown list. Also, notice how subject headings are listed below the title of the resource providing another strategy for discovering subject headings used in the database.
When a search term is more than one word, enclose the phrase in quotation marks to retrieve more precise and accurate results. Using quotation marks around a term will search it as a "chunk," searching for those particular words together in that order within the text of a resource.
Examples:
"cell phone"
"distracted driving"
"car accident"
TIP: In some databases, neglecting to enclose phrases in quotation marks will insert the AND Boolean connector between each word resulting in unintended search results.
Truncation provides an option to search for a root of a keyword in order to retrieve resources that include variations of that word. This feature can be used to broaden search results, although some results may not be relevant. To truncate a keyword, type an asterisk (*) following the root of the word.
For example:
Library databases provide a variety of tools to limit and refine search results. Limiters provide the ability to limit search results to resources having specified characteristics including:
In both the EBSCO and ProQuest databases, the limiting tools are located in the left panel of the results page.
EBSCO ProQuest
The short video below provides a demonstration of how to use limiters to refine a list of search results.
Each resource in a library database is stored in a record. In addition to the full-text of the resources, searchable Fields are attached that typically include:
Incorporating Fields into your search can assist in focusing and refining search results by limiting the results to those resources that include specific information in a particular field.
In both EBSCO and ProQuest databases, selecting the Advanced Search option will allow Fields to be included in a search.
For example, in the Advanced Search option in EBSCO's Academic Search Complete database, clicking on the down arrow next to "Select a Field" provides a list of fields that can be searched within that database. Select the field and enter the information in the text box to the left to use this feature.
Stop words are short, commonly used words--articles, prepositions, and pronouns-- that are automatically dropped from a search. Typical stop words include:
In library databases, a stop word will not be searched even if it is included in a phrase enclosed in quotation marks. In some instances, a word will be substituted for the stop word to allow for the other words in the phrase to be searched in proximity to one another within the text of the resource.
For example, if you searched company of America, your result list will include these variatons:
This short video demonstrates how to create a search string -- keywords connected with Boolean operators -- to use in a library database search to retrieve relevant resources for any research assignment.
