Maternity and Infant Care covers topics including pregnancy, labour and birth as well as research relating to the first year of an infant’s life. It is most relevant to Midwifery students, but can also be relevant to certain topics from other disciplines that include work with women and infants such as Social Work, Child Nursing, Surgery, Public Health and many others.

MIC searches over 250,000 articles and other information sources, and presents an abstract or summary of each one to help you determine whether it is relevant to your needs. It has options for a simple search as well as for more complex searches suitable for in-depth research, and allows you to narrow your search down in useful ways such as by the date or the type of information.

• Go to LibrarySearch 
  
  
• Log in using your CCCU username and password. If you are away from campus, or connecting with your own device over Wi-Fi, you will need to include @canterbury.ac.uk after your CCCU username.
  
  
• Select Find Databases A-Z, then click on M, finally click on the link to Maternity and Infant Care to open it in a new tab.
  
  
• If you get an additional username and password screen, click the “OpenAthens Login” link – if you have logged in to LibrarySearch already, then you will not need to type your university username and password again.

The database can only be used by a small number of people at any given time. If you get a message saying this limit has been reached, you can come back later and try again.

If your search only involves one or two words, the basic search is fine, but we recommend using the “Advanced Search” or “Multi-Field Search” options. Advanced Search allows you to enter your search words one at a time and then tell the database how you want it to combine them. Multi-field search allows you to put in all your words at once.

Advanced search is the default option, and is how the database is designed to work. To use this, search for one concept at a time:

• Click Search History at the top of the page.
• Select the check boxes next to the concepts you want to combine.
• Click AND to merge the searches if you want both words or ideas to appear in your search.
• Click OR to merge the searches if you don't mind which word or phrase appears - for example, searching for articles which relate to teenagers or adolescents.

For example, at the time of writing, a search for breech finds 2178 items and a search for twins finds 5204. When combined together, Maternity and Infant Care finds 180 articles which match.

Multi-field search provides three boxes for search words. It is a faster way to search, and will often retrieve more articles, but may not be as accurate. This allows you to search for multiple concepts simultaneously:

• Ensure that the drop-down boxes between the three search boxes read AND.
• Enter one concept into each box (you can leave a box blank if you need to).
• If there are multiple words for the same concept, enter than into the same box with OR between them. For instance, teenagers OR adolescents.

Narrowing your search

Once you search, you can narrow the selection down using options in the left-hand column. The most useful ones are “Years”, to select the date, and “Publication Type” which allows you to narrow the results down to particular types of information such as Guidelines or particular types of research.

Each item will have an abstract you can read, which will highlight the words you searched for. If you decide you’d like to read the whole thing, there may be a web link (for news items, for instance) or for journal articles there will be a “Full Text Finder” link which will check to see whether we have the article available through our online library.

See the video further down this page for a brief demonstration of the use of this database.

The database platform does not have a dedicated accessibility information page.

If you wish to read an abstract when you are using a screen reader on Maternity and Infant Care, the site works best if you select the “View Abstract” button rather than the “Abstract Reference” link. You can also click the title of the relevant article, which brings up a much more detailed page. 

1. Try a search for midwifery education. How many results do you find?
   
   
2. Try another search for drama. How many does this find?
   
   
3. Then, go to “Search History” at the top of the page. Select the tick boxes next to the searches for midwifery education and drama, then click the AND button to combine the searches. How many results are you left with now?
   
   
4. Click on the Abstract button for one or two of the results to see a summary of them.
   
   
5. Find a recent article and try to access the full text using the Full Text Finder link.
   
   
6. Look through the different types of information that come up (for this search or for a topic that interests you) and consider how you might use these in an assignment for your course.

Your Learning and Research Librarian will be able to help you make the best use of online resources. For detailed guidance, book a tutorial via the Learning Skills Hub.