Sunday Shift at the Reference Desk

There are days when it's just really slow-going at the reference desk. Today was one of them. Plenty of students in using the computers, but very few needing much assistance. Despite that I did get a doozy of a question. A student came to ask for help finding two peer-reviewed articles on the rectus femoris muscle (a part of the quadriceps I've come to find out). The difficulty was that it could not be a case study or a case report. Lots of articles on the muscle group, but we couldn't find anything that wasn't a case study. I suppose that most medical journals would prefer to publish results from experiments.

Turns out that I had the best luck searching some of the more general databases like Proquest and Academic Search Premier rather than some of the more focused medical databases I started with like Medline and Cinahl. I did a keyword search for "rectus femoris" with limits on Peer-reviewed and Full Text and did some scanning of the results list and found 3 articles the student could use. Just goes to show - sometimes (and I usually don't think this is true in a search strategy) the most general your search, the better your results.