Kristen Jones-- Meeting with the Subject Librarian

For my research,  I met with Mike Goates in a small group setting. His presentation was tailored towards the basics of  research and included some good suggestions on where to start our research. However, I already knew about the major databases such  as Pubmed and Web of Science but he suggested a few others that have been helpful as well. The TA and Mike Goates then went around and met with each of us individually and gave us some more suggestions about our research. During that meeting, I was able to find a couple of articles that will be good for my literature review.

 I am researching the correlation of childhood vaccination exemptions and lost of herd immunity. It is a very interesting and controversial topic. As I was researching, I found many articles that included opinions of different radical groups but were not based on any scientific evidence. Although these articles were interesting, I had to learn how to narrow my search terms so that only relevant scientific based articles came up.  I have found several sources that have studied incidence rates of different vaccine preventable diseases and its correlation to areas with high levels of childhood vaccine exemptions. Interestingly enough, many of the maps that show high concentrations of childhood vaccine exemptions also show high incidence levels of children with vaccine preventable diseases.