Transcript - Advanced Social Work and Human Services Library Research - Oct 24 2018

Video Link: https://youtu.be/p3ZjrpVLu0I

 

Begin Transcript

 

Narration:

 

If you have a question ask it in the chat box and I will answer in a timely fashion. I want this to be an informal learning experience for us. Hopefully you will leave this webinar feeling a little more confident in gaining advanced research skills. Let's talk about what we will cover, but first a little bit of housekeeping. So you should have a pod that you can get to your chat box.

 

I do have a -- power point. I don't follow it to a T. I will have it to back to. You can download the power point if you want. I have some links if you find it handy. Closed captioning is available, and I have that link in the chat box for all of you. Feel free to ask questions and we record talked about that.

Lastly you will get a recording of the webinar via of the e-mail you will get tomorrow. It's a follow-up e-mail so you will have the recording if you want to come back and watch it again.

 

All right. So today we'll go over your research guides which are nifty one stop shopping places where I have added a lot of research. Essential -- human services and resource work. You are probably already using data bases already. Sometimes article alerts and things like that. Key word searching is always evolving.

It takes a lot of practice. So we'll talk about key word searching for a little bit and how to set up journal alerts in data bases and in google scholar. Looking at dissertations is a good way to practice advanced research and I want you to find distions in different ways. This is a chart for beautification.

It's a good visual of the and, or, and not concept. Take a look at that later.

 

When you are doing advance research, most are doing it for a review. We are going back the past five years. You are looking for the evidence of the gap in the literature, and justification for why your study or your research is important. A lot of my students really struggle with this. They have a personal life.

We all have personal lives, we work, and we have daily experience and sometimes we want to write about that. Say for instance we work as school counsellors and we want to write about school counseling or a certain type of care. You have a particular research interest in mind because

you live on a daily basis and you are interested in it. That is not how the lit review or the research process works.  You are going to have to survey the literature on your broad research interests and see what the current scholars are saying about your topic and then finding the gap.

So the gap is something that says further research and so you may find the article within your realm of your research interest and it's calling for a further research. That is your gap. That is where you can step in and say that is me. I'm going to provide that further research. So that is your justification and that is really the goal of the review and looking for articles and doing advanced research.

 

So I do have some links. Some hot links in the power point. I have another webinar called "finding the gap." I do recommend going in and it's a little more detailed finding the gap and the justification for your

research. We have a lengthy guide on the review in the library. So make sure you look at those we'll get to where to get help later. I'm going to get out of my power point if I can I will can look at my chat box and don't forget to ask a question.

 

This is the library's home page. Hopefully you are well-versed in searching the library's website and familiar with some of your data bases and course guide and all of this. You may not be familiar with your research pages if you are in human services you want to go to select a subject and hit human services.

and so this is your research guide you want to bookmark. The reason I ask you to bookmark it is it's good to come back to the main search box here. This is searching hundreds of hand selected journals in

the human services field that I chose. See you can put any of your key words here and start like that.

This is a better start than Thoreau. That is a beginner’s search.

I want you guys with advanced research you want to go in to your subject specific data bases.

You want to look at your human services or social work data bases and move away from Thoreau.

the other thing I like about your research guide is that you have human services data bases.

I have a list of the best bets here and I have links of journals for human services and sociology and more

specific like women's studies and feminism and so on. If you want to get familiar or just browsing literature in a particular journal you can hit these links and browse those.  A guide on lit review and theory and stats and data and upcoming webinars and things like that. I have one for human services and I also have a page for my social work. And they do differ a little bit. So depending on what program you are in be sure to do that. Those are your research pages.

 

The other thing let's go into a data base. Depending on what program you are in. You are probably familiar with see index with full text. This is the highest quality research data base within sociology.

It's going to cover human services and criminal studies and gender studies and this is the best bet for my

human services and social work students. I hope you are using it and familiar with it. Let's do a demo really quick just in case.

 

Let's go to SOCIA index with full text it's the best bet. if I'm going too fast or anything you guys speak up.

You have to sign in. You never signed in so there you go. Hopefully you are familiar with your three research boxes. With advanced research skills I want to show my students you don't have to stay in one data base you can search several at a time. Up here where it says full text it says choose data

base w's. You can click on that. Here are you can pick and choose how many you want to search at one time. I have a lot of students that get overzealous and they search all. You don't want to do that.

If your topic is not really business related you don't want to search in a business data base you will get

non-relevant results that won't help you. You want to stick to data bases that are in your field or discipline or research interest.

 

My particular research interest is veterans with PTSD. I think I have to look at social work and psychology data base it is. And I will click on social work data base. This is published by the national social of social workers. It's great data base. We just got it. I really advocated for it for you guys.

Click on social work abstracts. Click on psych info. I think I will need it for my research interest because

I'm incorporating PTSD and I think psych info will be helpful for me. if I'm not finding a lot on my subject, I will come back and hit psych articles. A lot of this is getting more familiarity with data bases and you will get that with practice. Now I'm searching more than one data base.

 

Let's talk about keyword searching the big thing I can tell my students is to start broad. Even though you have a specific topic you want to start broad. I am looking at veterans with PTSD and substance abuse

disorders or something like that. I want to start my search very broad I don't want to limit myself right now. A lot of students get frustrated we they do a keyword search and don't get any results. If that is happening to you take a step back and broaden your search terms. Start with the main concepts of your research interests and that is all I do on this page. I don't worry about this stuff down here. I will get to that in a minute. I'm just going to hit search. Before you do anything and look at your results the first thing you want to do right away is get used to doing it. You want to refine results in the left-hand side in the blue shady area.

 

The first thing I want to do is normally one click the peer review scholarly review box. That way I will get the peer lit review. Let's change the publication date. I don't want literature from 198. So, change your publication date to within five years. I'm going to do something quick right now. I'm going to uncheck a couple of my data bases. I want you to get the idea that you can add extra at that time data bases if you need to. Now I have to go back and do my search. That is okay. Wore worries. I can go. Once you do good search and a good list of results there are a few things you can do.

I feel like are advanced research skills. I want you to start browsing your subjects. Look at what is underneath your title. Subjects are what the data base is saying that this article is mostly about this.

It's about PTSD and aggression and psychology of veterans. This is maybe an idea that will lead you down a different path of research. So for instance. I'm just reading and going through the results and I

get to this one No. 5 prisoners and PTSD. and under the subject it says animal assisted therapy.

And 9 other thing you can do instead offing on the left happened side under "subject " in the blue shady area you can click show more and this is showing you all the main subjects that these art cees are about.

I can go through here and check on the ones I'm interested in. Perhaps I'm not in like war veterans.

I may not check that. I will just check on PTSD and military services. This are other things that you can do on the left-hand side as well.

 

So let's go into that article that was interesting to me what we can do. Once you get an article you are used to going to the full and you are looking at your subject and reading your abstract and you are printing it and saving it and organizing it.

Which are all advanced and EPSOO data sis allow you to do things by hitting site and you do need to

look at that before you turn it into your professor times pat at caller roars. You can copy thatling and put it in a word document and put it in an e-mail to yourself disbrus a way to get back to the search.

Once you use the persistent link it takes you back. and it will have your full text. It's a good way to save your research and remember the key words you used and what you did. the other thing you can do is you can set up an alert. What that means is I will hit click e-mail alert. And I will ask EPSCO any time any article gets put in the data base and matching my limiters and matching my key words that I will get an e-mail once a day or once a week. if you set up an alert don't do it once a day because you don't want to get too many e-mails. I'm sure you get enough e-mails as it is. Maybe just bi-weekly. To get an e-mail alert I do believe in e-mail alerts. I think it's a great time saver. You don't have time to see if there is new literature coming in on your topic.

Let the data base to that for you.

 

Up here with it says sign in and create an account. This is separate from the library account.

This is your own personal thing. It's yours and yours alone. You would create an account most of high students will use a lot of data bases. When I say socioi believe index and psych info and

those rich databases. So creating your own account allows you to organize folders and to drop say you want this art kill you would click this little plus folder and it will drop it into the saved soldier within EPSCO.

 

There are neat little things that you can do. It's kind of a backup. It's on a cloud and not on my computers. There are a lot of benefits of creating an account. the one thing you have to remember is every time you do research and you go back into the library you need to sign in to your account.

So you make sure that you are signed in. if you think you can handle that it's a good idea to

create the account start organizing within your folders and so when they get an article matching your criteria, all of your limiters and peer review and date and you will get an e-mail and that is a big time saver for my dissertation students. Feel free to ask a question. If there are no questions I will move forward.

 

All right let's get out of the data bases and let's do a quick google scholar demo. I want my students to use google scholar which I have bookmarked here. I want you to use it smart and there are a couple of

things you need to know about it if you use google scholar. Get to know the data bases first.

Particularly the socioand psych index. Use google scholar to exhaust the literature. Sometimes google scholar will have something we don't and vice versa. You want to link them together and you want to hit

settings and you want to lit library link and you want to type in Walden University library and that is for world catalog and that is showing you local libraries near you that may have something that you need.

I leave it checked. Hit save. If you forget how to do this, we have answers on the quick answers hit save.

 

So let's do a broad search and you know how I feel about broad search. And the first thing remember we don't start browsing we do our limiters. We will do since 2014 google scholar makes it easier to do that on the left-hand side. What I wanted to show you is you can create an alert here.

So if I had a good search which I would try to do a

better search than that just like a very, very equine

assisted therapy.

That is specific horses and vets and PTSD. You can create an alert. Like we did in the data base. You would hit create an alert on the left-hand side and do the same thing. You add your e-mail. I guess you get an alert whenever. Let the data base work for you and with you. Set up your alerts. Now when you find an article that says "find at Walden" do you have any problem finding it. When you see the find it Walden button. It's supposed to link you to the article. a lot of students get confused when they see it because they don't know what it means exactly or how to use it. When you are in google scholar if it says "find at Walden " just click on it.

I hope this works and so, it takes you to another page. You are just kind of following a path. The "find it Walden " button is a path to your full text article. A lot of students get confused when they get here.

Like what are they trying to tell me. What it's saying is we think we have found your full text of your article and it's in all of these data bases and pick the one you like. I'm not familiar with a lot of these.

I usually click the first one. So I will click on that. It's a little slow on my end. Sorry about that.

but the "find it Walden " button is a linker. Don't be afraid and click on it and follow the path.

You should eventually get to the article. Mine is loading embarrassingly slow and it should get you

there. if it doesn't you should let us know. You need to e-mail us. If it doesn't work for you e-mail us and let us know it's probably a broken link or something we need to fix. Make sure you let us know about the "find it Walden" button.

 

I want to talk one more thing about keyword searching that I skipped over, and I feel like it's important that I mention it for my advanced students. Advanced researching really involves using your BOOLEAN

connectors. Remember the chart I showed you. Go back and look at that chart. It's a good example of the and, or and not. Maybe I'm doing veterans again and I'm not picking up enough I want to put in related concepts and synonyms. Us your OR connector. I would do a capital OR. Something like that.

So when you think of the OR connector you are thinking of the related synonyms. And you are telling the data base I don't care if you give me an article on veterans or combat veterans or the military I will take any of those three. That is what you are telling the data base. You want PTSD or it's spelled out.

That is what the "and " does you are connecting with the "and" and expanding with the OR. Another example that is good to look at. Say you are looking at senior citizens or elderly people.

You can do a search for elderly or connector or aged or senior. The other thing I have seen my students do they might be just studying children. So you might do child, or youth, something like that. So start practicing with your OR connector.

Believe me it's a game changer as far as advanced research skills. I use it in almost all of my searches.

This is advanced were research skill with your BOOLEAN connector and your and ors. What about the not.

 

>> I don't hear much about the not.

 

>> If I put veterans and PTSD and I don't want to see substance abuse. I may hit not substance abuse.

I don't want to use substance abuse I'm using pet therapy. I don't use the "not " a not. I never do.

>> If you get the same results on something you don't want to study you are looking at elderly people in

hospice care you may want to use the "not." the main thing I want you to practice is the OR

connector and use your synonyms. I will move on to dissertation. You click on dissertations.

We have two-page dissertation data bases. the first is dissertations from Walden. This is only from Walden students and the second one is all. This is coming from institutions and university from all over the United States and the world. This is a huge database and this is Walden.

 

Before I do a demonstration in one of those. Let me scroll down to this link. Walden award winning dissertations. The reason I want to show you this. If you are starting to write your dissertation take a

look at some of these award-winning dissertations and doctoral studies. if you are like me you are curious as to what made them outstanding. I want to know what their lit review looked like and

how did they word their research process? And so going in there and looking at that those awarding winning dissertations is helpful, I think. I have even printed one and printed the lit review to just kind of get an idea. I do recommend that. How do I get back hit the back button. Let's go into Walden dissertations. See if we can find something.

 

Say for instance you want to look at some PhD dissertation on your topic. Maybe our topic is teacher evaluation. Type it in. Let's do PhD and let's change that second anywhere box to degree. There we go PhD degree and search it didn't turn up anything. I don't know why I put teacher evaluation. I should have stuck with my main topic. Veterans and PTSD. It doesn't like that either. I might be doing something wrong. Don't mind me and my terrible mistakes. Let's do without the degree. Maybe it doesn't like that today. Believe me it works. I have done it a million times and today it doesn't like it.

 

So let's hit search. Browse through some of these results and look at their lit reviews and see what they are doing. Perhaps you want to look at some dissertations that have been chaired by your chair and to see look at some of those.  You can do that as well. So instead of veterans and PTSD we might want to say find a chair. the chair is Sandra Harris. Last name first and first name last. And then change anywhere to advisor. You can also look up an advisor if you don't know how to spell their name correctly, or forget. You can get a list that you can look up an advisor. Or you can choose whoever the advisor is. Then hit search. So now I have a list of 11 results that have been chaired by Dr. Harris. So that is another way to browse dissertations. We have some more information on that that I will show

you at the end but, it's a smart thing to do.

 

Remember how we can save search alerts you can do that in pro quest too. So you would want to create an account in Proquest and hit save. If you are not going to use this a lot I wouldn't. I would just browse my dissertations and move on. You will be doing more research in EPSCO data bases. I want you to look at dissertations and find dissertations on your topic.

 

Before we go into where to get help, I want to recap everything that we have done. So we started on the library's home page. We find of moved away from Thoreau. I want my advanced researchers to use the subject session specific data bases in your field. Whether that is human services or social work.

a lot of my human services and social work students their topics are multidisciplinary. And for instance, I may have a human services student that is studying education or administration. You may want to browse an education data base. If your topic involves another aspect go into an education data base.

You will see what is out there in education. So if you have an education slant I would recommend go

to education source it's the best bet for education. Perhaps you are, I think the other day I had a social

work student who was her main focus her -- she was doing a research study on female inmates. I asked her to go into criminal justice data basis. She needed to look at prison information and some criminal justice information. Female inmates, so we want to criminal justice data base which is the best bet for criminal justice. Play around and don't stick with one.

 

I know my beginning students have stuck with Thoreau and now we are branching out to our subject specific data bases. So get familiar with them. If you are feeling particularly savvy go to the data

bases A to Z and browse. Every time I do this I get more and more surprised. We have that. I didn't know we have that. Play around.

 

The very first thing here is AARP is state data center for reports on Medicare and long term for senior

citizens caregivers and that is an awesome data base if you are studying senior citizens. There is so much in here. So, so much.

 

The NAC foundation is amazing for stats on children and families and when you are doing this xploratory

research and becoming more familiar with the data bases and dissertations and research and journals and library research in general you want to get more help. We looked at going into the data bases and we looked at keyword searching and we looked at creating an account in EPSCO. Which is sign in here.

Where you would sign in to create your accounts and you can save folders and set up journal alerts.

We did the same thing in google scholar. Then we looked at how to find dissertations. We have just gone through this really fast. What if after this webinar you can't remember and you forgot something that we went over.

 

First of all, you can contact me and I'm your personal librarian and I am always there to help students.

Sometimes you don't need me and you just need a run thank you or a tutorial or instruction. if you need help there are lots of different ways. On the library's website is go to start your research. We are actually getting help. So go to "get help." Perfect. So one thing you can do to get help is use our quick

answers. I use it every day. Quick answers are maintained and created by my fabulous colleague Lynn.

and Lynn gives great instruction on simple basic library skills and advanced skills I love how she gives

great instructions.

 

Let's say if an article is peer reviewed. Say if you don't know about that you can type it in and

ask quick answers. We should just call it Lynn because she is the best. and Lynn will tell you the steps you have to do to verify if your article is peer reviewed. She gives you visuals and numbered steps.

You can't beat quick answers for instructions. I seriously use them all the time.

 

>> What about finding dissertations. I forgot how to find dissertations let's say for example. So detailed instructions and visuals and quick answers is the best. I'm not joking when I say I use it all the time.

 

>> It helps me on the reference desk when I'm helping students. The other thing you can do is watch recorded webinars. Like this one you can hit on record the webinar. Perhaps you are not advanced searching, yet you want to brush up on basic library skills. We have tons on basic library skills. You can go into here and watch. We touched on google search alerts. This is a webinar on google search alerts.

You may want to look at that. We have a webinar on citation management software that is interesting.

and what is wrong with my computer. Going slow. Lots of different webinars for you to watch depending on what your topic is. We have a good one on like I was saying earlier the

literature review. And so if you clicked on "lit review " how to find a gap in literature. I recommend it.

My colleague Meg did it last year in May. She is easy to listen to and she is good at explaining how to find the gap. I watch this from time to time to get a brush up on how to tell students how important it is to find the gap. She has a five-step strategy. And there are others in the series. So if you have time on your hands come back and watch some of these webinar recordings for additional assistance.

 

Then you can also contact us via "ask a librarian." As you know we have a virtual reference desk and you

can e-mail us by clicking on e-mail. Typically, we respond within 24 hours. Honestly, it's like within 2 hours. Depending on if you write in when we are off work or it's a holiday weekend or something like that. You usually get a prompt response. You can also chat like a real live person which is popular.

and you can hit chat and see if the chat hours are open it's usually four hours a day in the morning and in the evening. This is good for a quick question. Not lit review questions. Lit review questions can get complex and detailed as you know. but good for a quick chat or if you need something quick. You can phone us but be aware you will get a voice mail and you will leave a message and you will get a

response via e-mail. Some people feel better about expressing their question on the phone than they do in e-mail and I can understand that.

 

And lastly, we have doctoral research appointments. I highly recommend if you are in your dissertation

phase that you meet with me or a librarian for a one-on-one session. This can be delivered via Skype which is cool because we can share screens or by telephone. or you can say I want to e-mail. Depending on what program or college you are in. You would click that and then you would click social work and human services. And so you would get there is me and some of my availability and click on the available times I have. If I don't have something available shoot me an e-mail and we'll work something out.

No matter what you will get the help you need and I will help you even if I don't have an available time

slot we will figure something out where I will be able to meet with you at a convenient time for you.

Keep it in mind.

 

That is a really good service for the lit review, if you are really having trouble finding literature and if

you need extra assistance with a data base, your key word search terms and your strategy we'll go over that in a doctoral research appointment.

 

Okay, I feel like I have been talking non-stop into a screen for about 50 minutes, so I'm going to stop here. If there are any questions go ahead and ask now. Happy to answer whatever questions you have.

And if not, I'm just going to say, have a good afternoon and thank you for attending the human

services and social work advanced library research. Good luck with your research.

Bye.

 

End Transcript

 

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