Note:

Below you will find a few suggestions for searching this topic. These suggestions aren't the only way to find materials, but they may help to get you started.

This might be one of the more difficult topics. Interesting, but difficult! Broadening to prion diseases, in general, could be helpful.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease

I. Find Background Information

  • Access Science.
    It will appear in an article on Prion Diseases;
    Note the bibliography at the end of the article. There may be some useful leads, here.

II. Search the Catalog

  • Go directly to the library catalog (rather than searching from the library home page).
  • Type in creutzfeldt-jakob and leave the pull-down menu set to "All Fields."
  • Under Limit Your Search, scroll down to select "Subject" and select the most relevant headings.

III. Find scholarly journal articles

  • Web of Science
    Web of Science is a good resource, but it's a little too good! A search for creutzfeldt-jakob returns over 9,000 articles. One way to narrow this down is to use the pull-down menu to direct the database to look for the phrase in the title of the article. I also like adding the term "overview." Here are some sample searches you might try:
  • creutzfeldt-jakob disease  use the pull-down menu to select [TITLE]
  • creutzfeldt-jakob and overview use the pull-down menu to select [TITLE],
  • creutzfeldt-jakob and background  use the pull-down menu to select [TITLE]

IV. Finding current and possibly some historical articles in popular (written for the general public) magazines and newspapers.

For current articles:

  • Proquest Research Library
    Enter your search terms;
    Place quotation marks around phrases;
    From the list of results, filter to Magazines; and select a time period;
    Under Publication Titles, select "more" to select specific magazine titles of interest.(to find titles like Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, The Spectator, The Nation and The New Yorker. These magazines might offer a more "popular" (non-scientific) take on creutzfeldt-jakob in relation to the mad cow disease scare, etc. Could be interesting!
  • Access World News
    Select a geography, e.g. United States;
    Add some topic terms;
    You may wish to use the pull-down menu to limit your topic terms to the Lead/First Paragraph.

For historical articles:

This may be a little more difficult. From your background reading, you'll discover that the variant of CJD connected with "mad cow," first appeared in 1994. How much was creutzfeldt-jakob discussed in the popular press before this time?

  1. Select the Advanced Search.
  2. Add your search terms
  3. Scroll down to choose Document types.
  4. If you wish, use the date limits on the right to restrict your results to a particular date range.