Gavilan College Library

AH 43 Medical-Surgical/Mental Health Nursing

Staff

ASSIGNMENT 2: Eating Disorders

ONLINE DICTIONARIES

In an online dictionary you can find brief definitions of terms. Let's go to the online Merriam Webster Dictionary and look up some terms. When you click on that link, you will open up a new screen. In the Look Up A Word text box type in your terms. Find the definitions and in your own words list the definition for anorexia nervosa and the definition for bulimia:

Definition for anorexia nervosa
Definition for bulimia (the disorder)

 

SUBJECT-ORIENTED INTERNET SITES

In this next example, we will look at an Internet site for information on our topic of eating disorders. As a health professional, you may need to provide sources to advise family and friends of those suffering from eating disorders. Let's go to a Web site to which you might refer them.

  1. Click on the link, Eating Disorders.
  2. Read through the article to find the answers to the questions below:

 

According to the site, with what psychiatric disorders do eating disorder sometimes co-occur?

What are the three phases in the treatment of Anorexia?

APA FORMAT
The APA (American Psychological Association) has published guidelines for writing research papers. In the last assignment, we wrote an APA citation for a book. This time we will write one for a Web site.

  1. Click on the Web site, Electronic Reference Formats.
  2. Look at examples, #77 and #78.

    APA format requires the title of the article to be underlined. Since you won't be able to do this on the computer, simply start the title with an underline, and at the end, put another underline. When no date is given on the site, put (n.d.) in the place where the date of the site would go.

  3. Return to our previous Web site Eating Disorders and write an APA citation for it in the box below. (Note that in a bibliography, you would type the citation in a hanging or paragraph indention format and it would be double spaced between the lines.)
  4. Type your citation below:

EVALUATING WEB SITES

As we covered in our previous assignment, anyone can publish anything on the Internet. Some questions to ask yourself as you look at information are:

  • Who wrote the information?
  • Who is paying the bill to publish the information?
  • Is there an inherent bias?
  • Do the authors quote research that can be checked or repeated?
  • How recent is the information?

Let's review where Internet information comes from. Major contributors of Internet information can be organized into four major categories:

  • Government sites: including 3 huge federally-funded national libraries
  • Educational institutions: universities, colleges & research institutions
  • Commercial enterprises: everyone trying to sell you something
  • Nonprofit organizations

You can tell which of these four categories is posting the information by looking at the URL, or address of the site. In the last website the URL (directions to the computer on how to get to the website you want) was:

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/eatingdisorders.cfm

The first part, http://, tells the computer what protocol to use. The second part, www.nimh.nig.gov, is the domain name and tells the computer what system to look for. The next parts tell the computer which document to load.

It's that second part, the domain name, that tells us from which type of institution this document is coming.

URL

Return to the web site Eating Disorders. Hint: In addition to evaluating the web document itself, its important to also go the home page to learn about the sponsor/author. To do this, click on the location bar (URL) once and the bar should be darkened. Click again and you will see your blinking curser in that bar. Place the curser directly after the domain name and delete what follows the domain name. So in this instance, you would delete everything after the ".gov". Then hit enter and that will take you to the homepage of the site we just viewed.)

 

In the box below, write an evaluation based on the five evaluation questions.

  • Who wrote the information?
  • Who is paying the bill to publish the information?
  • Is there an inherent bias?
  • Do the authors quote research that can be checked or repeated?
  • How recent is the information?

LET'S REVIEW

In this exercise we covered:

  • Finding definitions for medical terms using an online dictionary

  • Finding information in subject specific Web sites

  • Writing APA format citations for Internet documents

  • Examining URLs (addresses) of Web sites to determine the type of institution that stands behind the Web sites

  • Evaluating the source of your information for credibility and currency

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Congratulations!

You've almost finished. Now comes the most important part:

 Your Name:

Your Class Section #:

 

Your e-mail address:

Time spent on this assignment:

 And now you can click on the submit button

 

Address of this page:
http://gavilan.edu/library/nursing/ah43/two.html
For questions or comments, please contact
Susan Turner at sturner@gavilan.edu
Last updated August 18, 2005