Transcript - Advanced Library Research for Psychology Students - Mar 9 2020

Video Link: https://youtu.be/UzPpC4CAm7s

 

Advanced Library Research for Psychology Students

 

Begin Transcript

 

Narration:

 

>> Speaker: ANDREA LEMIEUX

So welcome again, everyone, to advanced library research for psychology students.  This is what we are going to cover tonight we are going to do a quick very brief refresher of database searching basics that we covered primarily in our Intro to Library Research webinar that we held last week.  But since so much of our other information that we are going to talk about depends on knowing the basics of database searching, we are going to cover that briefly to begin with.

Then we are going to spend much more of our time searching other types of information.  So how do you get that background information that is really helpful outside of peer-reviewed research?  How do you research theories and methodology?  And how do you search dissertations?

Then we are going to spend some brief time on searching Google Scholar and staying organized.  We have a webinar dedicated specifically to Google Scholar that is much more helpful if that is what you are going -- if you're going to be using Google Scholar quite a bit.  So we're just going to cover the basics tonight.  And then of course, staying organized.

And lastly I want to spend a little more time at the end on where to find help.  So if you want to learn some more about what we talk about tonight or if you want to link where you can ask questions, we will cover that and wrap up with that at the end.

So we are going to start with database searching and what that looks like in the Walden library.  As a refresher, there are two main points of entry, really, that you can search in the library database.  There is the top search box that would call Thoreau, and that searches the whole library, for the most part.  Then there is the research by subject.  That is where you can go to search psychology specific data specific databases.  So let's jump over to the library and look at that briefly.

So this is the library homepage.  Like I said, this top search box searches Thoreau, and if you want that traditional three surge boxes because that helps you set up a search, you can always click on the advanced search button underneath it.  When you do that, it gives you the traditional three surge boxes and you can tell here at the top that you are searching for row because it has that information about the top search box.

So what does Thoreau search?  Well, it searches everything here in research by subject.  All of our resources are organized by type of research like journal articles or videos or books.  They are also organized by subject.  So you can see these are all the program areas here in Walden and of course, psychology.  So when you click on the psychology option, you will see that all of our subject research pages are organizers similarly.

I don't recommend using this top search box.  That's not always clear to students what it is that you are searching.  So my recommendation is always to choose Thoreau if you decide that searching the whole library is going to be beneficial for what you are doing, or searching subject specific databases to have a much more comprehensive and subject specific search.  So this is where we find psychology info.

So let's look at how we search databases.  If you were to break down all of the steps in database searching, it essentially comes down to five steps which can really be distilled into three steps, which is essentially try it search, review your results, and then modify that search if you are not getting relevant results.

So within those steps are the 8 that you see listed here.  So let's work through a search briefly to see how we would work through those steps, 1-8.

So let's assume that you have a prompt from one of your courses either an assignment or discussion, or possibly even this is maybe a capstone or dissertation topic that you are interested in.  Choose a current topic in psychology and discuss its effects on his specific population.  What programs are being used to address this issue?  Use the scholarly literature to support your response.

So let's hop over to the library databases, and we are going to work through this search, steps 1-8.

Again, when choosing to search, you're going to have to decide whether you want to search Thoreau or you want to search a subject specific database.  For coursework, it's always great to start in a subject specific database because you have limited time to work on your assignments and discussions.  Most of our students are typically working adults, so you want to just delve right into the database that is most likely to have the information that is going to meet your research need.

There are reasons why you want to use Thoreau.  Some of those reasons may be if you are trying to search -- you are not sure what database to search.  You want to see more broadly what's out there overall on your topic.  So those are some reasons why you would want to search one versus the other.

And honestly, if you start with Thoreau and you get thousands of results and you want to focus on psychology or education, you can always try that same search in one of the subject specific databases.

So let's assume that for this prompt, it's coursework, and we want to look at psych info.  So we want to go into psychology.  And we are going to choose a database.  So in this case, we are going to choose psych info.  Because nothing main psychology database.  And we want to answer this prompt based on the psychology literature.  We might want to go into criminal justice.  We might want to go into education.  Those are all options as well.

So remember that it is one idea or concept per search box.  So we are going to put drug use, that is the topic that we chose and the population is high school students.  Now, we are going to put high school students in quotation marks so we don't get a search that is finding students in one section, high school and another.  We really want that concept, that exact concept, high school students.

Now, remember that step four is we combine similar ideas into one search box.  There are all these other ways that you can say drug use, substance abuse or drug addiction.  Let's see.  I don't know why that erased everything.

So I'm going to put that back in.  I'm going to put all of those terms that are the same as drug use in the search box.  So the database can find any of these terms and the exact phrase of high school students.

Now, for courses, we are going to click full text and unchecked for capstone or dissertation because we can always get the full text at another point.

And then we are going to click peer-reviewed.  We are not going to limit to date just yet.  We can always do that on the results page.

So we are going to click search.  And you can see we have quite a few results.  We have 1100 results right here.  So what does this search mean and where is the database searching for these terms?  It is saying find any of these terms and it also has defined high school students as an exact phrase.  Now, this drop-down menu on the left rarely has to be changed.  So don't spend much time going over that.  Just remember that or goes inside the search boxes.  Because that's going to get the database all those options to look for.

So it is going to certain the article title, the publication information, the subjects, which are the main ideas that are assigned to each article when they are entered into a database, and the article abstract, which you can get to when you click on the article title.

So now let's assume that we want to find -- that we found the full text maybe in the first page or two without modifying a research at all.  Full text PDF is pretty self-explanatory.  Find at Walden means the article is an another database.  When you click on it, it will either bring it to the other article or a database that you can select that actually has the article.  So in this case, these five databases have this article in full text.  So clicking on them should bring you to the full text, no matter which one you choose.

So that would actually be all the steps 1-8, but I want to talk about how can we go through and modify the search if we want to get it down to a couple hundred results.  Which is really a good will structured search.  A thousand is really too many to be browsing.

So when I review my list, I can look at the subject line.  And I want to see if I can narrow drug use at all.  So I'm going to look at some of the other concepts that have been labeled for each of these articles.  Prevention, self-efficacy, tobacco smoking -- so now we are getting into more specific drug usage.

I was seeing earlier in the search, a lot of results for prescription drugs.  So let's go ahead and try to narrow our search to drug use of prescription drugs.  So we are going to go ahead and start this.  But I want only articles whose main idea is prescription drugs.  So only articles who are labeled prescription drugs.  So I'm going to go on the right-hand side I'm going to tell the database to search for the subjects.  But remember you can also certain places like the title, the abstract, but in this case I'm going to tell the database to look for subjects.  So now I'm down to 39 results.  If for some reason we didn't get enough relevant results possibly that we needed for our assignment, we could again, broaden this.  Search and include, not only will it take results for high school students, but will also take results for teens or adolescents.

The reasons why put the asterisk there is that will search the root word of teen.  So where the word starts changing is where you put the asterisk.  So this will search for teen, teenager, teenage.  It will search for adolescent with a T and adolescence with a C.  And that's all the forms of the word adolescent.  So I'm going to update my search again.

And now I'm back up to 573.  If you remember the prompt asked for programs, what programs are being used to address this issue?  So if I wanted to add in another search box, I can put this plus button and add in program or possibly prevention or intervention because all those will be associated with some kind of program.  Treatment has to involve something.  So an intervention.

So we are going to click search and now we are down to 381.  So that's a good result.  If for some reason in our coursework cleanly -- needed to limit by date, we can come over to the blue column on the left, which are all the limiters that we saw on the homepage, and we can type in 2015, and we will get all articles since 2015 that were published.  So 143 results, and we still need to review the results and make sure that these are relevant.  If they are not, we need to go back up to the search and review those as well.

So that is how we do a basic search with all of the advanced search techniques thrown in there. So we have quotation marks, we have asterisks, we have field searching, which is when we told the database to search for prescription drugs in the subject line.  So we covered all of those advanced search techniques.

Now, one thing that we didn't cover in database searching that is really very helpful, especially when you are involved in a larger project or perhaps doing dissertation research, is the thesaurus.  And that is a great brainstorming tool.  What a thesaurus is, it's a simply a list of synonyms and related concepts or a term that you are using.  But they are all associated with that subject line.

So for instance in this search, all of these are subject terms are in the thesaurus, and it's going to give you synonyms and related concepts.  For example, let's do it from here.  I can always go back to the search.  So the thesaurus is typically at the top of the search page.  And when I click on here, resilience is actually a great term to use.  I’m going to click on term contains, so we will be starting in this search box because this is lease thesaurus, so I'm going to click search and resilience is in thesaurus.  So it's an official term used by the database which uses American psychological association psychology terms.

And this is what thesaurus is.  That obviously gives you the word at the entry, sometimes it will tell you the year introduced.  It will give you a definition.  But then it gives you broader and related terms and also all the terms that were used.  So if you are taking it back to one of your classes where you learned about resilience, you're like, I know that there are other terms related to this, but I just can't think of them, you can always try the database thesaurus because you might not have thought about searching posttraumatic growth or cognitive reserve or psychological endurance.  And of course in the older literature, the term used to be referred to as hardiness.  So the thesaurus can be a really good advanced search technique to use when you are working on more in-depth projects and research.  So that is thesaurus.

So this is sort of the review that I talked about on the overview slide.  So are there any questions about how you search these databases or how you break up a database search?

Okay.  So we are going to move on to other types of library resources.  Some of this information to be new to you, and it's helpful again, when you are doing advanced library research, where you are not something looking for one or two peer-reviewed journal articles.

One of the great things that we had in the library are encyclopedias and handbooks of books.  So just like a traditional library, we have all that information, but of course it's academically oriented.  So it's not your world book encyclopedia, and is not the same books, the majority of them, that you would find in a Barnes and Noble.  They are all for academic researchers.  Or people who want to really delve into a topic.

So what is great about these two sources is they help you understand the peer-reviewed articles that you are going to read.  Remember peer-reviewed is only one research study, typically there are other types of peer-reviewed articles, but it's typically one research study that focuses on very specific variables drug use and prevention in high school students.  Maybe they research a very specific aspect of that.

So how do we get a broader view, a broader understanding of the research associated with drug use and prevention?  Well, we use scholarly handbooks, encyclopedias, and books.

So how do we search for those?  We are going to go ahead and keep this search open.  Because we will use this a little later on.

Almost everything else that you are going to need that is not journal articles, you're going to find in this publications button over here on the right.  So when I click here, you will see all the other things that we are going to be talking about tonight.  And the last one on the list is encyclopedias, handbooks, and dictionaries.  Our main encyclopedia database is called Sage Knowledge.  And I find it is best use, although you can do any event search, is just to look up one concept or variable at a time.  So for instance, if we are interested in drug use and we want more of a background in this and a broader understanding, we can simply type in drug use and see what examples come up.  So for instance, if we scroll through, something that pops out to me is the sociology of drug use, which is a chapter in 21st Century Sociology.

This is a handbook.  And handbooks are great because they are organized by Chapter and unlike an encyclopedia.  That is organized alphabetical by entry.  So when I checked test click on this chapter, the sociology of drug use, we are going to see the type of information that you are likely to find in the handbook in the encyclopedia.

I don't know if you can clearly see on your end, but my scrollbar is all the way over here to the right.  And you can see, I can scroll down quite a bit.  So this article is probably about 10 pages long. So it’s not your World Book entry.

It kind of starts with an overview and we are going to move on to researching theory and methodology, but what is interesting about encyclopedias and handbooks is that when you look up a concept, it often we'll talk about.  And methodology.  So here are some early researchers in this area.  So this is going way back into some historical context.  So these are some researchers in this area.

If we keep scrolling down, we have been to see indications of early research.  So that's interesting.  But now we are getting into theories of drug use.  Now, we could have searched drug use theory as well.  We could have searched for a specific theory.  For instance, they are talking about social control.  I could have entered into the encyclopedia social control theory.  I could have looked up self-control theory.  Social learning theory.  So this is kind of orienting you to research, more broader research, a bigger overview of your topic.

Conflict theory for these are all theories that might be interesting to you that you might want to research further.  So that is how use encyclopedias and handbooks.

Now, books work very similarly.  So if we click on the books section, and like anything on our website that has one search box, typically underneath it is advanced search.  So if you click advanced search, it's going to give you those three search boxes.  So let's try a similar search to our topic that we were searching earlier.  So let's use our drug use, but let's not focus on high school students.  We are just went to focus on teens or adolescents, and in this case look more closely at prevention.  So one idea concept per search box, similar ideas in one search box separated by or.

So we have 534 books and book chapters that talk about this.  So again, you will need to look at the title and publication information to determine if it's a book or a book chapter.

So we see some titles, subject -- substance abuse counseling, this is really interesting.  Parenting and teen drug use.  The most recent findings from research, prevention, and treatment.  This might have some chapters that are really applicable to your research that would give you some good, broad insight into your topic.

So basically a book search works the same as our eternal searches and the interface looks very similar as well.

All right.  Let's talk a little bit more about theory and include methodology in that list as well.  So we talked about theories, that you can look for those encyclopedias or handbooks.  Well, we have, if you will back down to the encyclopedias and handbooks button, we have a database specific to methodology called Sage research methods online.

So if you click on this, you can search all kinds of information about methodology.  So if you are interested in a specific methodology like case study, again you can search that term.  And it is taking a little bit.  It only takes a little bit when I am presenting a webinar.  When I am doing my own research or helping students, it always is super quick.

So you will see encyclopedias of case study research, doing a case study, and if you scroll down you'll see all kinds of entries.  So before you go out and purchase any types of books, related to the methodology that you're interested in, you should always start with the library and see what we have available.  This is specific to counseling and psychotherapy.  So this might be exactly what you need for case studies.

You can search phenomenology, any kind of qualitative measures.  You can also search more broadly, like qualitative.  So you can see what handbooks and encyclopedias we have on qualitative research.  If you're not sure specifically what methodology you might want to apply.

So again we are searching for broad topics on qualitative research.  And you can see here the Sage Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods.  Qualitative Research in Psychology.  This looks like a different publication with a similar title -- actually might be a different edition as I look closer at it.  So there is all kinds of information on qualitative as well as quantitative.  Methodologies as well.

And again, you concert specifically the methodology or more broadly for ideas as well.  So mixed methods in social behavior research.  A lot of mixed methods.  Quantitative data for business and management.  And then it just has more information as well.  But you can look up specific aspects.

What is great about quantitative sources is that you can look up -- using encyclopedias for definitions and things like that, that you're reading about for that particular methodology that you're not familiar with.  So you can get quick definitions as well.

So how else can we search for methodology and theory?  Well, I left this search up, and I am going to take out this term because I want to have more results to search for.  This is quite a bit.  3100 maybe I should have kept prescription drugs in there.

You can also look up through your methodology and journal articles as well.  Typically any journal article on this topic is going to talk about a theory.  But a little trick you can do is type in theory or theories, or we could have used the asterisk to search the root word, but I'm just going to type in both for right Now, and it will search for articles that are focused more on theory or theories, because these words are going to be mentioned in the article title, public information subjects, or abstract.  And when you search you can often tell just by searching in the subject line, it will start listing theories.

Now, this one, the journal, it's the journal article has the word theory in it.  But if I scroll down, let's look at the second one in the abstract and see what theory it is talking about if any.  Because we are going to have to review them.

This is talking about resilience theory.  So you could take a quick browse through here to kind of get educated on what -- and of course we are still limited to 2015. We could limit to the last three years, holy, things being used?  If we look in the subject line, will often see the actual theory listed.

So this is a really great way to kind of get a quick overview of some theories you might want to start looking into that might apply to your research.

You can also do the same thing with methodology.  So if I want to see what case studies have been done, and this case going to put an asterisk for study or studies, and want to see what else has been done in this area.  So I am going to click search.

And I have 77 results were they are mentioning a case study or the actual article was a case study.  And if we look in a result, this case study explored injury related expenses.  So that's another way to look for methodology as well.  So remember encyclopedias or handbooks, or you can actually use the journal articles to see that information as well.

So lastly, before I ask if there are any questions, so think through all this and see if you have any questions about any of the topics, the last thing we are going to talk about dissertations.  Again, that's an additional resource.

We have two dissertation databases.  So let's talk about why you might use one over the other.  Our first one are just completed Walden dissertations.  These are great to see what a completed dissertation looks like. so you can look at their literature, review the research problem.  You can also look at dissertations by chair.  So if you're assigned a chair for the dissertation, you can see the quality of dissertation, the type of dissertation that your chair has sat on.

And you can also use Walden dissertations to citation mine there articles that they use especially if you find something closely related to your topic.

And you can do that especially well in all dissertations from all universities.  You can look at their literature reviews and citations and mine those as well.

So you're probably not going to be surprised that once we click on the dissertation database, the search would get set up exactly the same as it would in our other databases.  So one idea or concept per search box.  And we are going to go ahead and click search.  I just want to point out that in ProQuest databases, and we know this is a ProQuest database, the search not only in the article title, publisher or abstract, they will search the entire article text.  So if we get thousands of results, were probably going to want to pick our most important terms and select anywhere except full text.  And that will quickly narrow our results.

So if that happens, we are going to go back and modify our search.  So 3429 results.  That's quite a bit.  That's because of looking in the article text as well.  Which they might only be mentioning Tina, and all of these concepts for another reason.  So my support and concepts I would say is probably -- let's see.  Possibly all of them.  There's not really one I can do without.  So let's see what happens when we select anywhere except full text on all these.  Okay.  We have 15 results.

And then we can limit to the most current ones.  So 2013 I see, 2016.  So if we wanted to see something more recent, we can limit by date as well.  Just like in all of our other databases.

So that is basically how you can search our dissertation databases.  Progress will talk about theories and methodologies and links to more information and examples of how to do that.

So before we move on to searching Google Scholar, are there any questions about any of the content that we just covered?

Okay. Let's talk about Google Scholar.  Often, most of our students that take our advanced library search webinars are the Master’s and Doctoral level students.  Even if you're not a Master’s or Doctoral level student, I would encourage you to use your time at Walden to learn how to use our library databases.  Even if you are an undergraduate and you think at some point you want to continue on to a graduate degree, because really when you think about a dissertation, a construction worker and the tools that they used to do their jobs, some are just better than others.  They rely on some primary and some secondary tools.

Your library database is really her primary tool as an academic.  I am not going to live if there is some learning curve and practice to using and being proficient at database searching.  But like anything else that is important, you take some time to learn it.  So you didn't know about theory and methodology per se, until you started researching it.  And they are both difficult things to do.

Sometimes database searching, depending on your comfort with technology, can be a little difficult.

They are set up for the purposes that researchers need.  And Google Scholar, not so much.  Google Scholar does have pros.  Does have benefits.  It searches very broadly.  But often I find it more helpful to use it in very specific situations.  For instance, if I'm not finding something in the library database.  Google Scholar is a good check to see if there is just not much out there in the literature.  It also does something called citation chaining that we are going to talk about on the next slide.

What it doesn't do is it can be so limiting that it's really good to know these things before you start searching.  It doesn't limit to peer review.  So anything you find in Google Scholar, went to sort through the books and conference papers, which we know are not peer-reviewed, we have to verify that the Journal the article was published in was peer-reviewed.  And we have to do that in a database called Ulrich's.  It also doesn't limit to full text.  So the two ways you can access from Google Scholar, the library content, is to use our preconfigured Google Scholar search or link it to the Walden library.

And the link is good.  It works most of the time.  It can be a little glitchy, but if you clear your browser of your cache and cookies, you have to reset the link to the Walden library.  And if you don't realize that you have lost the link for whatever reason, it can just add more time to your searching.

And to do the same search that we just did is difficult because you have to know how to set up the search properly in Google Scholar.  So if you're interested in using Google Scholar, I would highly recommend that you take our webinar on Google Scholar.  Because it is 30 minutes of in-depth information that can make you much more proficient at using it.  So if you're going to do that, I highly recommend doing something like that.

Now, what I do want to focus on in Google Scholar is what we call citation chaining.  You can always look to the past of any article.  Can always citation chain from the references of a journal article.  So you can look at a journal article in its references and see all the older literature that influenced that research.

And I have a link up here on how to find an article by title in the library if you find something in an article reference list.

But what Google Scholar does is it will tell you from the article that you have, who has cited it since it has been published.  So if you need something current from the last 3-5 years, and your article is 10 years old, you can see who has cited it since then, and maybe you will find other relevant information.

So how might we do this?  If we were interested in -- this might not -- let's see if we can find an article that might be in there.  These are pretty current.  2016.  Okay.  Let's say we found this article from 2016, it's a little too old, we need something other more recent.  We can simply copy the article title and we can go to Google Scholar, search the article title, and it will tell us in 2016 only four other articles have cited it.  But they might be relevant.  So if we click on cited by, you can see these four articles.

And you can look them up by title in the Walden library or if you have it linked, it looks like none of these are available in the Walden library.  So these might be relevant.

I'm getting some feedback from students that my audio -- that I have lost my audio.  So if someone on the other end can tell me they can still hear the audio, that would be great.

I think other students can hear me, so I am just going to restart the webinar.  So just hold on for one second.

So that is how citation chaining works.  But we also have some more information from the slide and some webinars that cover this information as well.

So that is Google Scholar in a nutshell.  But I again recommend taking the Google Scholar webinar if that is something you are interested in learning more about.

So any other questions?  About Google Scholar?  Okay.

All right.  So there are a few things to keep in mind about staying organized.  So again, in advanced library research, you are either doing a much more in-depth project or you're trying to find something very specific.  So all of these tools are going to help.  If you are doing in-depth research, one of the most important things is staying organized, especially for projects, capstones, and dissertation.

So what I would recommend as a minimum is using what we call a search log.  There are two different types of ways to track what you're doing with articles.  The first is tracking searches picks up where you search, why you search, and the result you got.  We're going to focus more on that.  I'm not really spent much time on the literature review matrix, because if you take some of the writing seminars, they talk much more about that.  Because that tracks the articles that you find.  That is a tool that allows you to compare methodology, theory, implications, recommendations for future research.

But what we care about in the library is you know where you have searched and what was the best searches for your topic.

So what does a search log look like?  Well, this is essentially it.  It has five columns.  And you set it up in Excel.  There's a simple Excel sheet.  So on the far left you put the database title.  So I could replicate this, all of these searches, I would go to psych info, and I would put in social support in the first search box, recidivism or reoffending the second box.  Related only to peer-reviewed and there were 164 results.  Some of the observations that they made was that they found new keywords they didn't think to search. Social networks, social adjustment, institutional release.  All concept that they found in the database psych info.

So this is great, again, to keep track of what you searched and where you searched.  And what gave you the best results.  So at a minimum, a search log is really essential.

Now, for capstone and dissertation students, particularly for dissertation students we are going to talk in a minute about how you can then further use the search log.

Next is citation management software.  Now, like Google Scholar, I don't spend much time on this because we have a webinar and a --  that is devoted specifically to citation management.  And it will be incredibly helpful if you want to use it, for you to spend the time to learn how to use it.

So I recommend that you look at our over you view webinar that will talk about what citation management does and what options you have.

Then we have two separate seminars and guides for two free pieces of software called Zotero and Mendeley that we provide help with.  So this manages your citations.  It manages articles that you found in the citations associated with them.  It can be a really powerful organizational tool, but there is a bit of a learning curve.  So depending on your comfort with technology, it will depend on how quickly and comfortably you are able to learn the software.

So that is just a little bit about citation management.  I don't want to spend too much time on it because we literally could spend the whole hour just on citation management.

Lastly, before we get to our how to find further help and support, you can also set up in our databases search alerts, especially for our dissertation students, you can lose that use search alerts for any of the database searches from your search log that you found to be particularly useful and relevant.  There is a way in our databases to set up an alert where you can receive an email for any newly published information that was entered into the database as well as any older information that we gained a subtraction two.  So maybe we had a suspicion to it publication for the last five years, but we gained more content to, say, the last 10-15 years.  You'll get alerts on those.  All those can be particularly helpful.  So keep in mind that is also another option.  If you want to learn more about it, the links in the PowerPoint have that as well.

Okay.  So let's wrap up with how to get help.  Unless I didn't pause for questions, so I can answer any questions that come up or like I say, I'm able to spend a few more minutes after 8:00 to answer any residual questions as you are sort of reflect on the things that we talked about.

So where can you learn more on your own?  Where can you go in the library to find out more information?  You don't specifically need help, but you want to learn more about citation management or you want to look at Google Scholar, how can you do that?

On the library homepage there is this get help button.  And that will be at the top of all of our web pages.  So when you click here, you will see upcoming webinars, but you also see recorded webinars.  So when you click on recorded webinars, and you click on webinars on library skills, you will see all of what we call our mysteries series.  So you can see all of the options over here.  So you can learn more about peer review.  If you want to learn how to use Thoreau better, we have a webinar on that.  I talked about Google Scholar.  So you can take -- take a 30 minute webinar and learn more about one specific tool or research strategy.

You can also look at all of our psychology recorded webinars as well.  So this is a great archive of all of our previous webinars that we hold live throughout the year.

What else is on the get help page is a library skills guidance.  And a lot of that is linked in the PowerPoint.  But for instance, something that is not linked is our guide on choosing a topic.  A lot of students struggle with this.  So how do you choose a good topic?  What if you can't find anything in the database?  And how to work your assignments and discussions as well as example topics and finding inspiration.

So a lot of good guides in here that will help you.  If you contact us at Ask a Librarian, we will often point you to these as well.  So that is where you can find our recorded webinars and how-to guides.

Where can you go to ask questions?  Sometimes you just need to be able to ask a question.  There are lots of ways to do that.  You can use our quick answers, Ask a Librarian email or chat or a Doctoral research appointments.  They are kind of tiered.  So quick answers is really a searchable FAQ.  So we like you all a lot, but not enough to work at 2:00 in the morning.  So you need to ask a question, but nobody is working, so where do you go to ask a question?

Again, the top menu of all of the library pages, there is this Ask a Librarian button.  Actually, let me back up.

Where can you ask a question when we are not working?  If you click on search everything at the top, you can then search what we call for quick answers.  So tonight we didn't cover what a DOI is.  So I can tap that type that in so we can see the answers we have regarding the DOI.  In the middle is our quick answers.  You will see question like what is a DOI?  How do I cite an article without one?  How I cite an article with one.  So you will look at it will see that you will see a short answer to your question.  And of course additional research as well -- I'm sorry, different additional resources as well.  So that's what you can do when it is 2:00 in the morning.

For any other time we might be working, you can use the Ask a Librarian.  That's where all of our other help lives.  So you can see all the options here at the top.  The first is you can email us.  You fill out a short form.  Our response time is 24 hours, but honestly, we typically respond within a few hours.  We staff Ask a Librarian seven days a week.  So if you are working on the weekends or evenings, we staff it throughout the week at different times.  Depending on the time of the term, whether it's start term or three weeks in, tend to get busy.  We typically answer your question within a few hours.

Certainly try this, but do not hold us up, if it takes 24 hours.  Because that is the official government line here.  Excellent supposed to be caught telling you.  So 24 hours.  That is email.

What I would first check is if you have a quick informational tech question, is our chat hours.  For instance, we have chat available from 8:00 to 10:00 tonight Eastern time, so everything is listed in Eastern time.  You can't ask us how to do a literature review in chat.  A, we won’t answer you, and B if we did, you would probably be more frustrated than had you not ask.  Because chat is not really the place to do that.

If you're trying to find a full text article or you have a simple database search, you're trying to look for an article on a particular subject, we can help those.  But remember any chapter testing you do on the phone or with businesses online, it can become confusing.  So it's really best for shorter informational tech questions.  So be aware that our use chat.

You can leave us a voicemail, but we only response to it via email.  So look for your email for a response.  But we do understand some questions are just better asked verbally.  And so you are welcome to do that.  But make sure you check your email because we don't call students back.

And lastly, our Doctoral research appointments.  Those are available only to our Doctoral students.  And what that is, is a 30-minute appointment that you can focus specifically on your research needs.  And any specific questions that you have.

To schedule a psychology appointment with me, you can go down to college, social and behavioral sciences, and psychology.  Unfortunately, I have one appointment left for the rest of March.  So it never hurts to check back.  Sometimes students cancel and appointments open up.

That we have other research librarians that can help you but all of my appointment book up, and they're actually really great and they can help you with anything that I would be able to help you with as well.  So keep that in mind.  Sometimes, for instance March is really busy -- busy for me, I will post my April hours midmonth.

So if you are looking -- you really do want to meet with me because he thought this webinar was fantastic and I would be an incredible help, if you would wait until midmonth, my April appointment will be open.  So dissertation students, you should be able to wait because it is a long process.  And there is lots of times to schedule appointments in there.

So that is the end of the webinar.  I don't see any more questions, so I'm going to thank everyone for coming and stop the recording.  And like I said, I will stick around for a little bit longer for any residual questions that come in.  But again, thank you, and hopefully I will see you all at and Ask a Librarian or a Doctoral appointment or possibly at residency as well.  So thank you for coming and happy researching.

 

 

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