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Nursing and Health Sciences

What are Reference Tools?

 What are reference tools?

  • Encyclopedias
  • Dictionaries
  • Thesauri
  • Atlases
  • Biographical compilations

Reference works can help you:

  • Define important vocabulary words related to your topic
  • Find a basic overview and main issues related to your topic
  • Learn references to additional resources
  • Discover important background information related to your topic.

Nursing eBook Collection

Online Reference Tools

Oxford Reference Online contains more than 100 Oxford University Press dictionaries and reference books that will define key terms such as incubation period, which is the time between initial exposure to an infectious agent and the appearance of the first sign or symptom.

Gale Virtual Reference Library consists of numerous full-text specialized encyclopedias, which can be good sources of background information, topic overviews, and basic facts about a topic such as infectious diseases.  At the bottom of most articles are links to additional information.

Gale Science in Context include science topic overviews, reference articles, biographies, periodical articles, images, videos, and detailed experiments.