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RESEARCH GUIDES

Public Health

Guide to selected resources in Public Health.

Definition of Government Resources

What are Government Information Resources?

The government produces a lot of free resources on public health related topics. 

  • Produced by government agencies (local, state-wide, national, or international)
  • Intended to report on agency activities, assist policy makers, keep citizens informed, etc.
  • Government agencies around the United States and the World publish vast quantities of statistics and papers on public health issues
  • These resources are an excellent (and often over-looked) source for health information as they usually go through a rigorous acceptance process before publication
  • More and more, government information is freely available online
  • Government websites can be identified by '.gov' suffix

Getting Started

Government Information

The UMD libraries are an official depository of government information and so we have a lot of government resources.

To locate these resources, consult the guides: 

To help narrow in on the government information resources that would be most helpful to you, think about which government agency would be interested in your topic (National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, etc.) 

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Tip: You can limit Goolge  searches to government websites by adding site:.gov to the end of your search terms.

For example: obesity site:.gov

Locating Government and State Documents

Additional Federal Government Sources

CRS reports are produced by the public policy research arm of Congress and are heavily researched and written by experts in the field on legislative issues. They provide a wealth of information and are excellent sources for research. They are available fulltext from 1916 to the present in the Lexis Nexis Congressional Database

Also see Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports in Health Law and Policy from the UM Thurgood Marshall Law Library.

Additional Maryland State Government sources