Hints on how to do your own research

If you have access to the world wide wide (and you must have to be reading this) there are several strategies you can use.

First you need to decide what you want to know - think up a few keywords that describe the subject area you are interested in - for example I will use 'aspergillus'. You could use a disease name or drug name or something less specific such as 'environmental health'.

Next you need to find information by searching for your keywords. The best way to do this is to search the whole world wide web using a website devoted to the task - the best I know of is www.google.com.
You can go to this website and type in one of your keywords in the box provided, press 'google search' and it will retrieve any matches it finds - when I typed in 'clinical trials' it returned over 500 000 matches (or 'hits'), but the best matches are listed first so you needn't look at more than the first 20 or 30 in the list.
To reduce the number of hits so that your search is more specific you can include more keywords in the search e.g. 'clinical trials' and 'aspergillus' returned 1350 hits - all of these hits (they can be web pages, entries in databases, discussion group messages etc.) will contain all three words. This search is typed in as three seperate words with a space in between 'clinical trials aspergillus' (do not type inverted commas).
How you type these keywords in varies between search engines - many require a '+' sign between words.
Searches can be refined further by for instance excluding specific words e.g 'clinical trials aspergillus' but not including any hit with the word 'AIDS' gives 773 hits. In google this is done by clicking on 'advanced search' and typing 'clinical trials aspergillus' in the contain box and 'AIDS' in the exclude box.
All search engines provide extensive help on these issues via appropriately named links such as 'search tips'.

If your interest is in anything to do with Aspergillus, one of the most comprehensive databases available is on the Aspergillus website in the library section. Here there are all the papers, conference abstracts and books on this subject (and anything else we can find that is relevant).

If you want up-to-the minute published papers on almost any subject the place where all the best research results are to be found available free to the public is at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in the resource called PubMed. Here you will find all of the latest medical and scientific literature and there are abstracts of most references available.

To find more than an abstract of a paper you need to go to a large hospital or University library to read the journal or to order a photocopy of the article - you will usually be charged for this. Access to these facilities can be difficult and varies from one to another, so it would be best to contact the institution first to check if you will be allowed in! Alternatively talk a friendly student into doing it for you?
If you are in the UK it is possible to go to your local library, fill in a form and pay a small fee (£1-2) to order any book or article from a journal.

If it is books that you want to look for, Amazon is quite a good commercial source, but they will try to sell you the book!
The British Library (you will need to apply for a password) and the Library of Congress in the USA are good free comprehensive resources to find out what is available, but to get the book you will have to go through your local library system.