Library Transcripts

Video Link: https://youtu.be/1nhkGaeX22E

 

Advanced Library Research for Counseling Students

 

Begin Transcript

 

Narration:

 

>> ANDREA LEMIEUX: 

Welcome again to Advanced Library Research for Counseling Students. What we are going to cover tonight is a refresher of database searching. We are going to do that quickly at the beginning. We covered that more in-depth the other evening in the Intro to Counseling Library Research. So you can watch that recording on the library website if you haven't already watched that. So we're just going to do a quick review of the content.

 

Then we're going to talk about searching other types of information in the library that we didn't have a chance to talk about in that webinar -- searching background information, theories and methodologies and accessing and searching dissertations.

 

We're also going to talk briefly about Google Scholar, not as in-depth, I'm sure, as some students would like, because that's really a secondary resource that we use here at the library, but we're going to cover that so you know it's pros and cons and what it is best used for.

 

Then we're going to wrap up with how to stay organized. You're looking at all these different resources and types of information, so how do you keep things organized? We are going to talk about tools and techniques to do that. Lastly, we will talk about where to find help, which is how we wrap up just about every webinar that we do.

 

So let's jump in and talk about database searching. At this point in an advanced library research webinar, you all should have been in the library at least in some point in your program area. As a refresher, I just want to point out there are mainly two points of entry to search in the databases for primarily what you will be searching for, which is peer-reviewed research articles. So we are going to hop over to the library and I will show you what those sections are.

 

You should be seeing the library homepage now so please let me know in the questions box if you are not. The two main ways we search are this Search box in the top of the main page and we call that Thoreau. That searches all of the library. When I say "all of the library," what does that mean? Well, it means that it searches everything here and this research by subject box. When I click on that, you will see all of these areas that we offer degrees here at Walden.

 

So like a traditional library, our resources are arranged by subject. So if we were to click on Counseling, all of our counseling resources are arranged on one page. As we covered in our intro webinar, counseling databases and on our other subject resources pages can be found under this first dropdown menu. You will see the top five counseling and psychology databases here, and then, to view the entire list, you can click on "few all counseling journals databases."

 

But as you should all know by this point, PsycINFO is the main go-to database for psychology and counseling. So that is what you should be spending quite a bit of your time during coursework.

 

Think of, when you were deciding where you want to search in the library, think of having 30 minutes to research your topic. If you were to use Thoreau, that is now going into the library and you have to search every single section. So you can see you're only going to be able to do a superficial search, because it's not going to be narrowed to a specific subject. Now, think if you have 30 minutes and you only were searching in Counseling, how much more research you would be able to get on.

 

There is reasons why we would want to use Thoreau versus a subject specific databases, and we, again, cover that in the Intro webinar. And hopefully, you're all familiar with what a databases and, all that is is simply and electronic collection of materials that you can search. So instead of going to a bookshelf on the second floor on the north side of the building in the library, you're going to a specific database.

 

So let's jump back over to the PowerPoint. And we're going to talk about how would we want to search either 3 or those subject specific databases. Again, this is a refresher. These are pretty much 8 steps that you can use every single time you search. You may spend a little time on one versus the other step.

 

But essentially, it boils down to trying a search, reviewing the results, and modify that search. And that is all encompassed in those eight steps there. So as a trick, I would recommend maybe printing this slide and keeping it available where you search. Or you can save it to your desktop so when you're searching the library databases, you can literally go step-by-step.

 

Let's do a quick search and refresher on how to search for peer-reviewed research articles.

 

So let's assume our prompt is in our coursework or possibly this is maybe even related to a Masters level or doctoral level research project, "Choose a current topic in counseling and discuss its effect on a specific population. What programs are being used to address this issue? Use the scholarly literature to support your response."

 

The first step in that list of eight is to make a list of your ideas. We chose the current topic of drug use and the population of high school students.

 

The second, within the first step, is to brainstorm all the synonyms in case researchers or the databases are using terms that are similar but not quite the same as what you're using. So drug use, a synonym would be substance abuse or drug addiction. And high school students over in Europe is often called secondary school or secondary education. And, teenagers or adolescents are more general but in that area.

 

So how would a search look if we were to do that in the library databases?

 

I am going to search subject specific databases, because as an advanced researcher, typically will be in subject databases, versus Thoreau, because you're digging deeply into a topic and Thoreau just doesn't do that as well as our subject specific databases.

 

So I am going to go ahead and click on Counseling, click on Counseling databases, and click on PsycINFO.

 

Now our third step is to enter one idea or concept per search box.

 

And, the fourth step is combined similar terms with OR in the same search box.

 

So I am going to put drug use OR substance abuse OR drug addiction in the first search box. I am going to put "high school students" in quotation marks so I can search it as an exact phrase in the second search box.

 

I am going to scroll down and I am not going to limit to full text, because as an advanced researcher, you want to see more the fourth out there. So we have full text and we also have citations. Now, if you find an article that we don't have the full text to -- working on a Masters or doctoral research project, you can request that article from us through our document delivery service. And you can use Ask a Librarian to find out more about that if you would like to do that.

 

So we're going to click on peer-reviewed and we're not going to limit by date first, because that's another advanced research techniques. Because often we want to see older articles, maybe find seminal articles or really ground breaking articles on a topic.

 

So we are going to go ahead and click search. And, we have1839 results. Remember that the in EBSCO databases, this is the inventor that licenses us PsycINFO, they search the article title, the publication information, the subjects -- which are the main ideas assigned to the article in each individual database. And, it also searches the abstract.

 

Now, if we found something relevant, we could go ahead and click on the PDF full text or Find @ Walden and pick another database to access the full text.

 

So one of the things we do when we experiment with searches is we look at the subject lines and find out words we might want to brainstorm and narrow our search. Because a good, well-structured search has about a couple hundred at the most. We can see terms like school-based intervention, alcohol abuse. So now we're seeing more specific drug use. Tobacco smoking. Well, prescription drugs are a current topic, so we can go back up, continue to modify our search, and if that's the only type of article we want to find, articles whose main idea is prescription drugs, we are ready know at the subject term because we saw it in the subjects line if you results down.

 

So, we can tell the database, find us only articles whose main idea is prescription drugs. So we're going to go ahead and tell it to bring up only articles where prescription drugs is that subject line. So I am going to go ahead and click search.

 

Now, I am down to 46 articles. So now, we might want to broaden this a little bit. So why don't, instead of high school students, we use some of the other terms on our list. And you will see, again, this is another advanced search technique, that I used in asterisk at the root word of both teens and adolescents. That is going to show us, that is going to search for all the forms of the word teen -- teen, teenager, teenaged -- and adolescents, both the person, and adolescent, and the state of being, adolescents with a -ce.

 

Now we can click search and update our results. Now we have 744, so we have brought it up a little bit. Remember, our prompt also wanted us to search for programs. But Intervention is also a type of program, or, maybe prevention or treatment. Those are likely to bring up articles that have to do with some type of program. And I got this fourth search box by clicking on the plus sign.

 

Now I have 489 results. So I could continue modifying those results if I want to. Or, we can start reviewing them. There is likely not 489 results when we go to the last page. It's likely going to be more like 200 or 300, because these are including duplicates from all of our databases. There's likely a lot less than that.

 

That is kind of a refresher. That is really quick and brief what we covered in our webinar the other evening. Again, that's a great webinar to watch if you want to watch this in a little bit slower motion. But that's kind of a refresher, because all of the skills we use this database to search for research articles, we are going to be able to apply in our other types of databases that we're going to talk about tonight.

 

Let's hop over to the PowerPoint again and we are going to start into some new content. So as a review, those are all the various advanced search skills that we just covered really quickly. So, quotation marks, using the asterisk, [indiscernible] we could have search for and in the title or the abstract and that is called field searching for we are searching a specific part of the article.

 

Now, this is a handy tool that, if you ever have a doctoral research appointment with me I often share with students, because I love this tool that in our databases. And it is called a thesaurus.

 

If you remember from your traditional library days, we would go into the library and right next to the dictionary was a thesaurus, it was simply a book of synonyms and related concepts.

 

Well, the database has that as well, and it is a great brainstorming tool. So I going to show you how I use that tool.

 

So let's hop over to the databases, again, and we are going to start a new search in PsycINFO. So we're going to go to Counseling and PsycINFO.

 

Now, I want to search for compassion fatigue and resilience. But I know from my previous counseling class that there's lots of terms for resilience, but I can't think of any of them right now. And I really open to all the related concepts of resilience when I am searching, because that's a very specific term, but I want to give the database as many options as possible. So we are going to go to the thesaurus which is typically at the top of the database. But in ProQuest databases, it might be somewhere slightly different. Just look for a term thesaurus, and you will typically find it. I actually can't remember right at the moment what it's called in ProQuest. I don't think they call it a thesaurus.

 

If you click on here, you don't want this first search box because you're just going to search PsycINFO again. You want this search box right here that's searching the thesaurus. So I am going to type resilience. I am going to do "term contains" just in case there is a phrase that resilience is in. We don't want "term begins with." You are going to click browse and you will see that resilience is the first word that pops up. I am going to go ahead and click.

 

You will see this is what it entry in the thesaurus looks like. So again, a database is simply the same thing you would find in a traditional library, it's just electronic. Instead of a page and a book we are seeing this entry. It will give you a definition, it will give you broader terms, related terms and other terms that are probably past and not used anymore. And, you can use any of these terms. Resilience is the best example because you might not have thought about searching "cognitive reserve" for instance, or "posttraumatic growth" or "protective factors." resilience also used to be called "hardiness.”

 

So if you're looking at the older literature, "hardiness" is a great term to use because that is going to bring it up in the older literature, as well.

 

This is a source you can use it, you can look up compassion fatigue, you can look up any psychological term. The PsycINFO uses the American Psychological Association list of terms.

 

So I am going to go over to the PowerPoint now, this is kind of the first section. So this was really a refresher, the thesaurus and some of the advanced skills might be a little new. And, we went by that pretty fast because we already covered that in another webinar.

 

So is there any questions before we move on? If you have any questions, you can post them in the questions box.

 

Great. Let's go on to other types of library resources. I know here at Walden, we emphasize peer-reviewed research a lot, because we believe in science and we want to make decisions and base our research off of what has been shown to be the case in research studies. Right? So, we base a lot of the work we do off of peer-reviewed research. But the same people -- your instructors, professors and other academics that write this research articles -- also contribute to other types of materials. So let's talk about some of those that you may not have explore much since being at Walden.

 

The first is encyclopedias and handbooks. These are your World Book Encyclopedias. These are academic encyclopedias written by academics for other academics. And the same with our book search.

 

Encyclopedias are great, even if you're doing Masters level and doctoral research, you really want to get a grounding in your topic. So if you're researching drug use and adolescents, you could read 100 research articles to get a good grounding that topic or you might find a great book chapter or entry in an encyclopedia that is going to give you a really good understanding of your topic. So when you go into the peer-reviewed research it makes sense, right? Because remember, peer-reviewed research is just a small, little slice of that larger topic.

 

Let's look at how you might use this in the actual library. These are my two, I am always pleasantly surprised with the information that I can share with students from encyclopedias and books. So we're going to hop back over to the library. We're going to close out the thesaurus, we're going to keep these other searches open. Because we're going to go back and use them a little bit later.

 

Like when you go into a library you have to look for signs and read them to navigate your way, one of the other things to be aware of at this Publications button on the right. This is where a lot of our resources live and we're going to go through a lot of these on the right-hand side.

 

The first is at the bottom, encyclopedias and handbooks. Our main encyclopedia is called SAGE Knowledge. So you can go right in there and, for instance, we want to search maybe drug use, because that's what our topic is. Now, Sage works best with just searching one term or concept, because think about an encyclopedia, it's usually covering something more broadly. So I have found the most success -- although you can use the advanced search and set it up very similar to our journal databases -- but I like to use it this way. If I click search you're going to see a list of both encyclopedias and handbooks. So it will tell you typically handbook or an encyclopedia. So handbooks are great because they're arranged by chapters and encyclopedias, like you probably remember, are arranged alphabetically by entry. So let's take a quick look at one of these.

 

Let's actually look at, how about the handbook, The Sociology of Drug Use, or The Handbook 21st Century Sociology the chapter is called The Sociology of Drug Use. Let's see what a typical handbook entry looks like. I don't know if you can see on your end on the right-hand side, my scrollbar is really small. That means this chapter is probably about 10 pages long. So let's see was included in something like this. So this is chapter 42 of this larger volume. So it is going to tell you about the sociology of drug use, it's going to tell you about early research. That's great. So you can get a really good grounding on how drug use, the perception of drug use has changed over time. Gives you who are the researchers in this area, which is terrific, because I'm sure some of the peer-reviewed research is going to mention these people. If we scroll down, some of the applications of that. Then it also talks about theories. We are going to talk about theories in a minute.

 

Encyclopedias are a great way to find theories. You can look up a concept like drug use. You can look up drug use the theory. And, you can look up a specific theory, was instance, a learning theory or self-efficacy. You can look up all of those different types of theories, whether it's by concept or a specific theory, and see what's available in our encyclopedias. And you may or may not find something, but it's always a great place to look. So it's talking about theories of social control, theories of social learning. You might not have even thought social learning have been applied to drug use.

 

Encyclopedias are an excellent, excellent place to look for background information to get grounded in your topic. And although you typically don't cite encyclopedias and often not books, either, they can often point you to the original research that you then can go up and look up in your projects and coursework.

 

So where do we find books? So again, everything is under publications. Most, most everything lives there. Something still. You will see, books is a type of publication, so you click here. You search box exactly like you do the peer-reviewed research. Since we only offer you one search box, always look for in advanced search link, because if you have multiple concepts, it's a lot easier to search. Remember our list of eight steps?  Number three was to want idea or concept per search box. So it's much easier to do when you have three search boxes versus one. It's just easier to set up.

 

So I click on advanced search and let's say I want to search sort of the same topic. We want to see without there for books.

 

So we're going to search drug use and substance abuse, teens and adolescents. And, we want to know a little bit more about prevention. So again, one idea or concept per search box. You never have to change this drop-down menu and OR always goes inside the search box. So we are going to click Search. And, we have 533 results.

 

We can continue to narrow it. You will notice that the results list is very similar. The book title or chapter title, so you will have to look at the citation to see if it's a book or chapter. The subjects. So then you can look and say to I want to search adolescent behavior, drug education, health promotion -- all of those types of things.

 

We see that prevention is a subject term, so, we can limit to subject again, if we want. So we will see substance abuse and counseling. This is really great. Substance abuse among adolescents, risk prevention and treatment. And so, you can do that. You can limit by date so you can see what we have that's the most current. Like our other databases, we have the option to further limit on the left-hand side by results page. You can see date is here in the middle.

 

Again, books are great, great places to look.

 

Now, we haven't yet got to theories. We're going to go and talk about that. But if we want, we could type in theory OR theories, and then we can see what books mention theories related to that.

 

Something here with substance abuse and counseling, I don't see theory highlighted here. So I can click on the title and see where that term is coming from. Okay, it looks like one of the chapters in this book is called Preventing Adolescent Relapse:  Concepts, Theories and Techniques. Again, encyclopedias and books can be immensely powerful in finding that information.

 

Now this, because it's an academic book, it's going to have an index and citations in the back, possibly footnotes. It is going to cite where they got their research from, so you can look at some of that original research if you want to. But this would be a great chapter to read to get an overview of what theories have been applied to adolescent drug use.

 

So, great, great, great tools.

 

So, I know we have a little bit of time, so I am going to pause here and see there is any questions about books, handbooks or encyclopedias. I’m going to close this out and I will open up the page, I want to keep some of those other searches open so we can play around with them.

 

I do have a question what are the asterisks for? Remember that the asterisk is to search the root word. If we just type teen, it is going to look for the word teen. Now, most databases are going to try to help you and search for all the different variations of teen. But for us to help the database a little bit, we're to put an asterisk where the word starts to change. So you can have a -s, -age, -ager for all of those. I would use the asterisk sparingly, because sometimes students struggle with using it properly and it can mess up your search a little bit. If you are not fully understanding this, there are more resources in the PowerPoint and you can see the links.

 

But adolescence is a good example because you could take out the asterisk and take out the -ce and type in -ts. So we can put an asterisk there to search. Homeless is another one, if you put in the asterisk it will search for homeless and homelessness. It is something to use sparingly, but something to keep in your tool bag, in case you find a word that has a lot of variations like that.

 

Let's move on to theory and methodology. We already talked about the written little bit, so we can look for theory and SAGE Knowledge that's the encyclopedia. We can look for it in books and we already looked at that. We can also look for it in research articles.

 

Now, the first thing to keep in mind is most research is based in theory, right? So any article that we find in this search, this was our original search, any article that we find is going to mention theory. But, if we type in theory OR theories in the search box, we're more likely to be able to browse the results list and see different mentions of theories without having to sort through a lot of articles and read through them thoroughly. What do I mean by that?

 

I'm going to do a slightly different search in PsycINFO. Now very similar to what we've been doing, I just kind of want to make it a little bit, some of it a little bit. Say we want to do what we did in the book search, drug use, teen or adolescents, prevention. I am going to add in another search box by using the plus button and type in theory OR theories. Again if we did the search without that all those articles are going to mention theory. But this is a neat little trick if you are just first starting to delve into theory. I am going to keep full text checked. You can go either way with this one. You may or may not want to read the article. The abstract may be enough to give you a clue as to the theory you want to investigate. And I am going to check peer-reviewed. I am not going to check date, because date is not so important right now. Some theories are still important that originated 30 years ago.

 

I'm going to click search and, here's some things to look for. I have 407, this is what will typically happen. You will often see, you may see, I should say, in the subject line, the name of the theory they're talking about. Here they are just using general theories. We will go back to that.

 

Let's see if I can find one that talks about specific theory... we may not be lucky in this search. Some searches and databases do this a little bit better. Okay, I don't see anything, it just really has theories in the subject, if at all. Okay, so this isn't a great example, I should have probably looked at this a little closer. But often you will see names of theories. Our other databases do this a little bit different.

 

Let's take this one, the main idea of this article is about theories. So if we click on the article title, we can look and see where theories is highlighted. So it's talking, this revised model provides a comprehensive and coherent framework synthesize from theories of drug use. So this whole article is going to be talking about different theories. This would be a good article, possibly, to look at the whole thing.

 

If we were to, let's look at this article and see what they mention. Sometimes they will mention the name of the theory right in the abstract. Let's see... this one is actually theory in the journal title. This may or may not be helpful, but I would look in one of those three places. Like I said, some of the databases do this a little bit better.

 

I want to click on one more, because I saw one earlier when I was doing this search that was really interesting. Here's one, here's one that talks about the theory of planned behavior, extrinsic motivation. These are maybe, maybe you haven't thought about that. Maybe you want to read more of this article. Maybe you want to go back to the encyclopedia and look up planned behavior. We can also use databases to look up specific theories. So I modified my search and if I want to see articles that have used planned behavior theory, I can simply type in "planned behavior theory." Now, I'm in PsycINFO, so it's going to bring up psychology literature that uses that. So it has planned we have your here. So that is a subject term. So I can limit by subject if I want to, so I got at 3400 articles.

 

I'm still at 1700, I probably want to limit by date or maybe add in some other keywords. Because remember, a couple hundred articles is really... actually, a better option is to do "planned behavior" in quotation marks and probably theory OR theories here is probably going to get us our best results. It didn't. We're back up to 2100.

 

But now you have at least a goal of getting that down to a couple hundred, because nobody wants to browse that many results.

 

Okay. I was looking at questions, I am going to go back to those here in a little bit.

 

Let's talk about methodology. Because we're still on article searches, I'm going to go and show you how you find methodology in the journal databases. But again, we have a specific database, it's an encyclopedia and handbook database, specifically devoted to that that methodology. So let's go back and look little bit about how you find articles by methodology.  And look at the database that's specifically about methodology, our database on encyclopedia and methodology.

 

Let's jump back over to the library and we have this search, originally, here. This is our original search. We have 489 articles. What if I want to see what qualitative studies, or what quantitative studies have been used related to this subject? Hopefully, you're thinking to yourself well, how would I do that? Really what we can do is simply put in the keyword we're looking for. We can put in qualitative, we can put in quantitative or we can put in the methodology we are looking for, the case study. So we can put in qualitative and we can click search. Some databases, like PsycINFO actually has a limiter for qualitative. I find if you just remember it as a keyword, you can use it across all databases.

 

It has a methodology limiter here on the left, so you could do qualitative study, interview, field study. But searching by keyword is going to get you just about the same results. So if you remember that you can use the keyword, then you can type this in here, as well.

 

I just would recommend doing this. This is going to only bring up articles if it mentioned qualitative in the article title, the publication information, the subject or the abstract. So this isn't all the qualitative, this isn't all the qualitative research.

 

But we can also expand it, so what other terms are used for qualitative? Well, case study is something qualitative. Any of these things, narrative or grounded theory. We could search any of those in this. If I added in case study, it should be, it should add more results to that.

 

I am just going to pause for one minute because I need to plug-in my headsets, they are beeping in my ear. Just hang tight for one second.

 

So I have a pair of wireless headsets and I will tell you a little story, is that I love them, but they just started beeping in my ears and it took me about three minutes listening to this while I'm trying to talk to you all figuring out what is beeping. [LAUGHS] So my wireless headsets about to die on me. Pardon my interruption there.

 

Now we have 24. You can search this for qualitative, quantitative, you can search for phenomenology, interviewing, if they use a specific quantitative method, you can search for that, as well. Now, if you get no results, you might want to take out some of these search terms and broaden your search.

 

Now, there's one more place you can look up information about methodology. You can actually get to it through publications, because it's an encyclopedia database. If you click on encyclopedias and handbooks again, it's right here. It's Sage research methods. So, SAGE Knowledge is general information just in 20 different subject areas.

 

Sage research methods are a collection of encyclopedias and handbooks for research methodology. I can type in case study. It's going to take a little while to search. So handbooks and encyclopedias on case studies. This is when you're looking for more information, your research methods classes are not going to cover everything, so you need to be able to look up more information about how to, how to do a case study, how to write up the case study, how to analyze your data. You will see there's all of these books in here about case studies. You can also search much more broadly. You can search quantitative. We have a lot of books on doing quantitative research in the social sciences. Qualitative books are really good because it will show you how to analyze a lot of that data, as well.

 

So, the Sage handbook of mixed methods in social and behavioral sciences. That's for business and management. We could search quantitative and social science if we wanted to or qualitative in counseling and psychology. Know that those options are there available to you, as well.

 

Lastly, We are going to look at dissertations. Now we're not going to spend too much time on this because, again, the same search strategies that we talked about, so those eight steps work exactly the same in dissertations. I just want to show you what is available and why you might choose to search one dissertation over another. It's also good to know that you can search dissertations by subject. You can search them by degree, so you can search PhD's, and you can also search by chair committee members.

 

If your chair is Dr. Heretec [sounds like] for example, you can search and see how many dissertations she chaired so you can see the type of work that she has chaired.

 

Again, we find dissertations under that publications button.  And you will see dissertations here. Now, I want to point out, we're not going to go too much into depth, but we have a database of recently completed Walden dissertations. Those are good if you want to see sample dissertations related to your topic. If you look in the last couple of years, you can see what was written on drug use and adolescents. You can kind of see what does the literature review look like, what was their research problem, how do they define their gap, how do they write their research.

 

Then, ProQuest dissertations and Theses Global has all universities dissertations. And, that is great to search when you're working on your doctoral research and you want to see if anyone has written on your topic or aspects of your topic. They have already done the research, so you can look at their literature review and clean and citation chaining all of their research that they found, because usually, their literature review is much more in-depth than a typical research article. If we look at the interface for the Walden dissertations, you will see that it is very similar. So one idea or concept per search box. We will just do a quick search so you can see with the results list looks like. We can do teen and prevention. Then, we're going to search.

 

So we have 3400 results. Now, we can limit by date. ProQuest does this thing, remember when I said in EBSCO that EBSCO searches article title, Pub synonyms and abstract. In ProQuest, it searches the whole article text. So we can tell it to search anywhere but the full text and that makes it search very much like in EBSCO database. This will probably limit to just a couple. Okay, 15 that have all of those terms in the article title, publication information, subject and abstract.

 

The slide has more information if you want to look up your chairs, the dissertations that your chair has sat on.

 

We are going to go ahead and briefly cover Google Scholar and staying organized. I am going to leave sometime after 8 o'clock. If you want to stick around, I know that everyone wants to hang out with their favorite librarian on a Thursday night, because we're not going to have time to cover everything in-depth.

 

Let's talk a little about Google Scholar. Now we're not going to have time to go over everything about Google Scholar. I want to just point out the pros and cons. The reason I leave Google Scholar until the end is because A, I usually run out of time and B, it should be a secondary resource for you. As master and doctoral students or if you are doing a capstone as an undergraduate, you should be using library databases. Those are the tools of academia.

 

Google Scholar has a lot of pros. It searches broadly, so I can search broadly the same topic. But I searched the same topic we were working with tonight and ended up with 64,000 results and the first result was a book. So if you look at the cons, you cannot limit to peer-reviewed. If anything that is considered academic -- books, conferences. Any type of information, reports, that may not be peer-reviewed, empirical research. Anything that you find in Google Scholar, you have to verify it in another database to make sure the article is peer-reviewed.

 

That also does not limit to full text. So you can use a preconfigured Google Scholar search on the library. You can link Google Scholar to the Walden Library and you will see some things we do have. But you can search so much more comprehensively and systematically in the databases that it's really such a great idea, it really is a great idea to learn those and to become proficient in searching library databases.

 

What is one thing that Google Scholar does really well, it does it better than just about anything? Well, it's called citation chaining. We are going to talk at the end of the webinar about a series that we do called Mysteries of the Library. It's a webinar that we do once a month and it's on a specific topic and we spent 1/2 hour on just that one topic. I recommend if you are interested in Google Scholar that you watch that webinar, and it is recorded. So I can show you where that recording is and you can learn everything you want to know about Google Scholar. If you don't want to take my advice, I'd rather you at least use Google Scholar as proficiently as possible.

 

The one thing it does do is citation chaining. If there is article we find that is older, maybe we can't cite it because it's not current, we can enter that article title in Google Scholar, so you can see here we entered the article "Promoting Civility in the ER:  an Ethical Imperative." You can see that since it was published in 2017, at least four other people cited it. Not bad. You can look and see if those articles are relevant and see if we have the in the Walden library. That is something that you can use when you're doing really in-depth research, citation chaining. That is really one of the last steps or one of the steps you do find on the line in your research.

 

Again, we have a webinar all about Google Scholar that you can take so you can learn to use it as proficiently as possible. So that is citation chaining.

 

Let's talk about staying organized. Again, these are things -- and again, I leave them to the end, because we have specific webinars on them, and I think some of the information that we covered earlier you're going to be using much sooner. So this information we are covering at the end, this information I want you to keep in mind so when you find yourself thinking really deeply into a topic for information for whatever it is you're working on, you can revisit this PowerPoint and look at some of the information here. So what are the basic things that you want to do?

 

The basic thing, at least from our perspective, is keeping a search log. That tracks your searches when you're doing an in-depth, when you're doing in-depth research, for some reason. It could be capstone. It could be dissertation. So what does a search log look at? We are going to look at one on the next page. But before I do, there is something that the Writing Center uses that is called a literature review matrix. And what that is is it tracks articles. But that is more of something for you to use to synthesize your research. So I often leave that to the Writing Center so you can explore that a little later.

 

But as far as databases go, this is what a search log looks like. If we were searching recidivism and reoffending and social support, I can re-create the searches that this student did. On the left, you will see the database that they use, their search terms, how they limited it, sometimes they limited to peer review, sometimes they limited it to peer-reviewed and date, the number of results and their notes. So in their notes they put themes that they're seeing to other keywords, observations they’re making in their database results. You can create this in Excel, so it's really easy to do. That is what a search log is, and I’m going to let you explore what a literature review matrix is on your own, because that is, again, when you're at the point of synthesizing all the articles you have collected, you want to compare theories and limitations and methodology, that's what a literature review matrix will do for you.

 

Lastly, our last topic of the night before we talk briefly about how to get help after, and then like I said, I will stick around and answer some questions, is citation management software. What citation management software is is it's a piece of software you can use on the cloud or you can download to your computer, you can use both. You simply download the articles and the citation information that you find. Now, there's a learning curve to this and it is typically used by our dissertation students because they are sorting through hundreds of articles. I want you to just be aware of this. If you hadn't heard about this before, you can refer back to this PowerPoint for guides and webinars that we have on this. We have multiple hour webinars on how to choose software, the basics of using Zotero and Mendeley, which are two free pieces of software. So just know that that is available to you and that is, again, much more sophisticated research strategy.

 

Any questions, briefly...oh, I forgot we had search alerts, Oh, search alerts. Let's talk about search alerts. This is a much more advanced search technique. This is, again, when you are in a deep research project of some kind and you want to stay notified of any older literature that was added to the databases that we didn't have previously. You can set up an email alert to be able to be notified when those things change.

 

For instance, when our holdings in the database change, for instance, with this search, once you're done searching and you start writing your research up, you might want to get notifications on anything new that's been added to the database. So you can create a search alert for this. Now, the instructions on how to do that are in the PowerPoint, so you can explore that further if that's something you would like to do. I always forget about search alerts at the very top variance.

 

Let's talk about where to get help. We have just a couple of minutes left. There's a few ways to think about how to get help. If you want to learn more about any of the things we talked about, we talked about all the research strategies that are out there and a few miscellaneous ones that we didn't even cover. If you want to learn more about any off this, we have additional counseling webinars and then we have the Mysteries of the Library series, and a whole bunch of How-To Guides. Where do you find that information on the website?

 

On the homepage, on our top navigation menu is where you will find that information. Under Get Help is where you will find all of our upcoming and recorded webinars. If you click on recorded webinars and go to webinars find topic, you will see the intro webinar for counseling is here. And our How-To Guides are all under library skills guides. If you want to learn more about the information that we begin with, you can go to the database search skills and it outlines it in much more depth there.

 

Now, where can you go in the library to ask questions? Well, there's a few different places. You can, if it's 1 o'clock in the morning, we like you guys but not enough to work at 1 clock in the morning for you. In that case, you can go to Search Everything, and we have a frequently asked questions database you can use. If you want to know more about DOIs, which is a topic we didn't even cover tonight, you can search DOI and looking in this middle column for Quick Answers, you will see that “What is a DOI? How do I cite an article without a DOI?” Then you will see information and short instructions on how to [indiscernible] that.

 

You can also ask questions to our Ask a Librarian service. There's a few different tiers of that. You can email us by filling out that form and we typically get back to you the same day. You can chat with us. For instance, we're open to chat tonight until 9:30 PM. I'm sure my colleagues are going to love it if you get right off the webinar and start asking questions. Tell them Andrea sent you. [LAUGHS]  They're going to just love me in the morning, I'm sure. You can leave us a voicemail, but we're only going to return your message by email, because it's just too difficult to get hold of a student by the time we get to your email. We staff Ask a Librarian seven days a week, but at different times, so there might be a pretty big gap of when we hear your voicemail, maybe back a few hours.

 

Then there’s doctoral research appointments. If you're a doctoral student, you can select the college of behavioral sciences and counseling and you can make an appointment with me where we will talk for 30 minutes about your specific research. You simply pick a day and a time that works and you fill out this form and then, we can talk and work specifically with your research topic. So that's available for our doctoral research students. Again, that's all under our Ask a Librarian button at the top of all of our webpages.

 

Thank you everyone, I know we did go over a few minutes. Thank you for attending. I will be hosting other webinars throughout the year, so please look in your courses for announcements, check-in with your instructors, reach out to us at Ask a Librarian or those recorded webinars. And hopefully we will see you at some of the Mysteries the third Monday of every month. I am going to stop the recording here and stay longer to answer questions. Thank you everyone for attending.

 

I have stopped the recording, and I am going to look at some of the questions. If you are sticking around and want to ask questions, great. There's only a couple hanging out in the queue, as far as questions.

 

I thought there was actually... I did have a question about when to use the ORs and when to use the ANDs. So let's go back to this original search. Basically, if you don't want to think too much about it, I completely understand. ORs always go inside the search box and ANDs always stay outside. These, for the most part, never have to be changed. Now if you're a really high end searcher you may change these. I myself, helping students, rarely change these. So you don't have to worry about anything else other than what we talked about.

 

So this search is a little bit like word algebra. What this means is, it's telling the database find me any of these terms, drug use or substance abuse or drug addiction -- so, any of them. AND, any of these. It's kind of like picking a word out of a hat. You get to pick any of these words. AND, you also have to pick one of these words, AND it has to have prescription drugs. There's no alternative, it has to have this. AND you can pick any of these words AND you have to pick one of these words. So just think of all the different combinations you could use. You find an article that says drug use, teenager, prescription drugs, prevention and case study. So it can have any combination but it has to have one in each box. If there's only one word, it has to have that one word, because the AND requires something to be searched in that box. So we call that Boolean searching. It's not important, I like to call them connectors, because AND and OR connect our search terms in a particular way. So that is something to think about. That is how we use the ANDs and ORs. It works pretty much in all of our databases.

 

Any other questions? I don't see any new questions in the queue, so I am going to sign off unless anyone has any last-minute questions. All right, perfect. Everyone, have a good evening. I hope to see you at some other webinars and thanks for coming out tonight.

 

End Transcript

 

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