Library Transcripts

Video Link: https://youtu.be/DLjPK4_2lo4

 

 

Begin Transcript

 

Narration:

 

>> MEGHAN TESTERMAN:  So, I have 2 PM Eastern time, we will go ahead and get started with our presentation. A few housekeeping things before we get started. There is a copy of the slide presentation available in the GoToWebinar user interface. You can just download that right there. We do have captioning available for today's presentation. You will find a link to the captioning browser in the chatbox. We also will be recording today's presentation and tomorrow, you should be receiving a link to the recording, so if you need to follow up or you want to have a look at it again….

 

Let's see ...great, we have a really great turnout today. I am really pleased to see you here. Let's go ahead and get started with our presentation.

 

My name is Meghan Testerman, I am the Psychology and Counseling Librarian here at Walden. I am joined by Julie James who is one of our Health Sciences librarians. Julie, would you like to say hello?

 

>> JULIE JAMES:  Hello, everyone.

 

>> MEGHAN TESTERMAN:  Julie is going to be in the background today helping me make sure everything goes smoothly and she is also going to be helping me answer questions. If you do have questions during the presentation, feel free to write them in the question box. At the end of the presentation we will go through and see if there is anything we can discuss together as a group.

 

Today we're going to talk about how to find a gap in the literature. My goal for today is to give you all a really clear roadmap of how to approach exploratory research to identify a gap in regards to your topic. So I am going to give you a little bit of theory behind it and I am also going to show you a really practical, quick and dirty approach in the library databases to help get you started with that search process.

 

So I am going to start by giving you a really quick rundown of how to find a gap. And I am going to do this in five easy steps. so, the first thing that we are going to do when we are trying to find a gap in the literature is, we are going to start with our area of interest.

 

So this is a really broad level approach. Let's say, for example, you work in a school and you work with teenagers a lot. You work with high schoolers and you are passionate about substance abuse problems among teenagers and looking for solutions. Let's just start with that. Let's say you are doing your dissertation level research, you are trying to find a gap on this topic.

 

Let's start with that really broad, drug use among teenagers. This is something that, if we typed this in to the database, we would probably come back with thousands of results.

 

Step two is we are going to use exploratory research to examine the current research in the field. At this point you're going to get a lot of results, but don't panic. You should be getting a lot of results at this point. We are still taking that really broad view. We want to get an idea of how big this topic is.

 

From there we can start to narrow down our area of interest with narrower terms and defining concepts.

 

We started out with drug use among teenagers. Let's think about how we can possibly narrow that down. We could think about a specific type of drug use or we could narrow our population down from teenagers to a more specific population. And we might come up with something like marijuana use among high school students.

 

This is going to start funneling down our topic.

 

Step four is, at this point, when we get a good, median topic, we can start to look at what the literature covers and what it doesn't cover.

 

Let's say for example, we are looking at marijuana use among high school students and as we look through the literature, we start to see that there is not a lot of research on marijuana use among high school athletes. That could be a really good lead, that might be something we want to pursue. Now we are getting much closer to that.

 

So our step five would be at this point, to look for opportunities to start to build on that existing research. So we are going to look for populations that have been under-researched, variables that haven't been explored or even opportunities for further research. What I mean by this is you can actually type in to the database "further research" with your area of interest. If you do that you will get research articles that in their conclusion have suggestions for further research. It will definitely point you in the direction of a solid gap.

 

So we might explore our narrowed down topic of marijuana use among high school athletes and we might explore some of the variables that haven't yet been explored in the literature such as marijuana use among high school athletes in Chicago.

 

At this point, I want to go over to the library and I am going to show you how to approach this through a database search just to do that really broad research. Then we will come back and talk a little bit about how you select the literature to include in your literature review.

 

Let's go over to the library homepage. I am going to start with Thoreau. Thoreau is our multi-search database if you have used that before. It is this very large, Google-esque search bar right here. We recommend that you start with one concept that is related to your topic. Pick the central topic and type it in to this box and just make sure that the Thoreau box is checked. I'm going to type in drug use and click the magnifying glass.

 

Thoreau searches about 80, 85% of our databases that we have available in the library. So it doesn't search everything and it is actually not a database. It is a multi-database search tool. You can kind of think about it as Walden's Google.

 

The reason I want to point this out from the very beginning is that if you are doing dissertation research in your dissertation and your topic [indiscernible], you are going to need to talk about your search criteria, how you found the information that you included in your dissertation in your literature review. When you do that, you are going to need to keep track of the databases you searched, the keywords you searched and what kind of journals you looked at. If you had any other limiters, you're going to want to log those in your search criteria. The search criteria is really just a one to two page summary of how you found the information that you included in your dissertation.

 

The when you do that, you will not be able to cite Thoreau because again, Thoreau is not a database, it is a search tool. The reason for that is that, within our search criteria, what we are doing is, we are leaving breadcrumbs for future researchers to pick up on your research where you left off. If you use Thoreau or cite Thoreau, it is not going to do future researchers must good, because Thoreau is only available to Walden students, faculty and staff.

 

Just as a disclaimer as we move into Thoreau, you will have to eventually move out of Thoreau and into those subject specific databases to do your literature review research. However, Thoreau can be a really great starting place for that exploratory research to just kind of feel out what literature is available on your topic and if you might be able to find something of a usable gap.

 

We are in Thoreau, we started with our very broad concept, drug use. We are going to select our limiters on the left-hand side to set our limiters for literature review the research. We are going to want to uncheck the full text box and check the peer-reviewed, scholarly journals box.

 

The reason that we do this is that, if we were to keep the full text box checked, it would only bring back articles and books and dissertations that are available in full text at the Walden Library. Unfortunately, no library has everything and when you are doing dissertation level research, you need to be able to see absolutely everything that's out there that you possibly can on your topic in order to come up with a comprehensive literature review, and in order to petition for yourself to be considered an expert in the field. So, we are going to uncheck the full text box.

 

Now at this point, I like to check the peer-reviewed scholarly journals box. Because most of the information that you use in your literature review is going to come from peer-reviewed, scholarly journals. If we check this box at this point, it is going to give us a good idea of what the pool of information is that we have to pull from in our literature review.

 

Now that we have checked those two boxes, we can search again and can watch our search results come down. It's taking its time. A little bit slow today, just bear with me. There we go.

 

Okay, just double checking here, we have unchecked full text, checked peer review.

 

Now we can expand on that area of interest that we were talking about.

 

Our area of interest we started with, our very broad topic, is drug use among teenagers. We are going to start this process of narrowing down. So let's go back over to the Walden Library and we will start with drug use and we will do teenagers in the second box.

 

What we like to do is keep one concept per search field. That is why I am going to separate these two out into drug use and then teenagers. We will click search and see what that does to our results.

 

Now we have about 14,000. That's about what we would expect at this point.

 

So let me show you, as we are running through this, what we can look at. So, we have drug use among teenagers, we can expect thousands of articles. If we start narrowing down to marijuana use among high school students, we will start to get hundreds of articles. Marijuana use among high school athletes should be dozens as we are getting closer to that. Then, marijuana use among high school athletes in Chicago should be close to 0.

 

Let's test this theory and try it out in the databases. Here we have 14,000. Now let's start to narrow this down a little bit.

 

Let's start with high school students and see what that does to our results. So we've got 7000. That narrowed it down quite a lot.

 

Let's just look at marijuana, we will leave off use for right now. That dropped us down another 4000, we are getting closer, there is still a significant amount of research on this topic. But that has narrowed it down a little bit more. Now let's see what happens if we type in "athletes."

 

Here we have 19. What would happen if we put in Chicago? Okay, so we have 0. That's a pretty good indicator that we have found a gap. But the problem remains that we still need to have literature to pull from for our literature review.

 

So just because there isn't literature on your exact topic does not mean that it's a total dead end. You can still absolutely do that research as long as it's a legitimate research question.

 

But now you're sitting here with absolutely nothing thinking, where am I supposed to get this literature from?

 

Let's go back and look at our strategy here. This is all of the different literature that came up to all these different searches. So we probably have a combined number of articles here, probably somewhere in the 10,000s.

 

So how do we know what articles we should pick to include in our literature review on this topic? Well, the answer to this question is, we want to kind of pull articles from just above these levels. We want to get as close to our topic as we can to provide relevant, current research on that topic.

 

So, once we have all this pool of literature that we can pull from for our literature review, we are going to start looking really critically at the literature that we want to include and we are going to examine it to make sure if it's the purpose of the literature review.

 

The literature review, I think a lot of students really think of it as just a survey of the current literature on your topic. That's not wrong, that is what it is. The literature that you choose to include needs to provide evidence of a phenomenon in the field and evidence of a gap in the research regarding that phenomenon. And it also needs to provide justification for why your study needs to be done.

 

Let's look at those two ideas a little bit closer. When it comes to evidence, we are looking for evidence that a phenomenon is significant to the field, we will be able to tell because there will be a lot of research on that topic.

 

So when we were looking at drug use among teenagers or even drug use among high school students, we were still seeing a really large selection of literature which tells us this is a significant problem to the field.

 

Some of the other topics that I have seen students look at are teacher burnout, coping mechanisms of patients with chronic illnesses, or successful leadership traits. At this point, once we have identified a phenomenon that is significant to the field, where going to start looking for evidence of that gap.

 

So what we are looking for is that there's evidence that a phenomenon exists. We definitely know that because there is a large amount of research on the topic. But there is a specific aspect of that phenomenon that has not yet been studied. So it could be a specific population or group or geographical location, a certain variable, etc.

 

For example, a student might develop these large, high-level areas of interest into gaps such as teacher burnout among first year teachers in special education in North Carolina.

 

Coping mechanisms of type I diabetics who have been diabetic for over 20 years.

 

Successful leadership traits of individuals leading startup companies who manage employees remotely.

 

So, all this evidence that we are collecting, evidence that the phenomenon is significant to the field and evidence that there is a gap, that something has yet to be research on that topic, that's going to give us the justification for why our study should be done. So we are looking for a legitimate demand for research. It needs to be an authentic puzzle to be solved.

 

So if you get yourself to this point and you think that you might have identified a good research topic, I would recommend at this point that you go over to the Office of Research and Doctoral Services and you have a look at the litmus test.

 

The litmus test is just a really streamlined checklist that will walk you through some steps to make sure that you do have a legitimate research problem. And you will see here, exactly the things we have been talking about. Is there evidence? Is it justified? Is it grounded in the literature -- which is exactly what we just looked at. Does it come from the literature in this sense? That's what it means to be "grounded in the literature."

 

So, the litmus test is a really great way for you to verify that you do have a good, researchable question. And it could be something that you can share with your faculty members, too, if they are looking for evidence that you have a good research problem and that you have done your homework. You can definitely go through this checklist with them and run through your topic to make sure it is going to be a good one.

 

So, I hope that you can kind of get a sense from this presentation that it is the literature that drives the research that we are going to do for the dissertations at Walden. Everything comes from the literature.

 

I know a lot of times students that I see kind of approach the dissertation from the perspective of, "First, I am going to come up with a research question. Then I am going to look for the literature to back up what I want to do." You can certainly try that strategy. It will be a lot easier for you if you follow the literature to a good research problem. It will be a more solid foundation for you to build your study on, and it's going to be easier for you to do.

 

So I am going to have a look and see if there were any questions that came in and if there's anything particular that you would like to discuss. Or, Julie, if there were any questions that came in?

 

>> JULIE JAMES:  Just one person wanted to point out to the limit by date, but we will get to that eventually. Another person wanted a transcript of the webinar. So, you can copy that from the captioning website, but there will be an official transcript coming in the future.

 

>> MEGHAN TESTERMAN:  Sure, let me go back and show you some dates. To do a date search is totally fine at this point if you would like to do that.

 

Let's go back a little bit, let's back up to our, one of our broader searches such as marijuana and high school students.

 

Okay. So you're right. Right now we do have a really broad set of limiters here. We have full text is unchecked, peer reviews is checked, and it goes back to 1966. So we can definitely bring that up to date and have a look at what that does to our results.

 

That takes it down another notch. And you're right, we are doing exploratory research, use the limiters that you think are going to be the most useful to you. So if it helps you to uncheck peer-reviewed scholarly journals so that you can see other dissertations that have been written related to that topic or if you want to see government reports or conference papers or books or background information, if that's helpful for you, definitely uncheck this peer-reviewed scholarly journals box and see what else comes up. Do whatever it is that is useful to you to get a sense of what might be available on your topic.

 

Really quickly, when you kind of go through this process of Thoreau, the next thing you are going to do is to go over to your subject specific databases and Thoreau will actually give you a pretty decent starting point for that, as well.

 

Here we are in the Thoreau and we've got a really broad search going at the top. We have almost 2000 results. If I look over here in the left column under find results and scroll down to the very bottom tab, I will see a box marked databases. This is going to give me a list of all the databases that these almost 2000 search results came from. So we will see here academic search complete, citation index, CINAHL. So, this will give you a really great roadmap. Have a look at the different databases that are recommended, go ahead and jot down the first 10 or 15 and start there. Go into those individual databases and repeat your search and see what kind of results you get.

 

Okay, just having a look to see what other questions there might be. There is the question here from Howard, "'It's the research question that drives the study,' is what the students are told."

 

That is absolutely correct, the research question absolutely does drive the study. It's what determines your methodology and your data collection and your data analysis. That is absolutely correct. But it is the literature review that drives the research question. The research question must be grounded in the literature, it's one of those checklist points that are here. It needs to come from an existing body of research on that topic.

 

So, there's another question here about the five-year requirement for your programs. Most of the rubrics state that you are going to need to, with the vast majority of the information that you include in your literature review is going to come from peer-reviewed scholarly journals from the last five years.

 

If you find something that is really good that is beyond that five years or is not peer-reviewed, there is a little bit of wiggle room. My suggestion at that point would be to make a case for yourself, make an argument as to why you think that should be included in the literature review and then take that to your faculty member to make sure that would be appropriate to do.

 

If you do find that you have a topic, if you're going to this exploratory research process and you are not finding a lot of current research from the past five years, maybe you're finding research from 10 or 15 years ago, then unfortunately, you might need to reconsider your topic. One of the requirements for Walden dissertations is that they are built on current research, and the University is a little bit less flexible on that requirement.

 

Here's a question that I think might be interesting to talk about. "How about a situation in which you see a practical problem in your community, say, violence among young people, for which I want to study the reasons, but there might not be much literature about it?"

 

That's a really great question, and a lot of students do build their research question, their area of interest, a topic of interest, around observations they have seen in their field or their line of work.

 

If that is the case, what I would say is, start at that area of interest. Take it at the broadest level here. What you're saying is something you're interested in is violence among young people. So there is short area of interest, violence among young people. If it is something you see happening in your community, maybe add to that "community violence" or "interpersonal violence," select a level you want to pursue. Start with that and then go into the databases and do some exploratory research to see what kind of research has been done on violence among young people in communities.

 

Then, look at some of their suggestions for further research to see if maybe they say we need to do more research on rural areas or more research on this particular population. That can give you some really good leads for the research for your study.

 

>> JULIE JAMES:  We have another question, "What happens when you do a preliminary research check and found a lack of investigation on a topic? Like, you think that there isn't anything written at all?"

 

>> MEGHAN TESTERMAN:  That's a great question, too. I am reading the rest of this. Sometimes, there can be definitely a lot of investigation on a topic. I see this a lot happening with topics that are incredibly recent or very new. A lot of times, this is due to the nature of scholarly research and the peer review process.

 

The peer review process is a process by which articles undergo a kind of quality assurance check. The articles are reviewed by other experts in the field for methodology, for research methods, to make sure everything is aligned, everything is done correctly, that the research adheres to a very high standard.

 

And, that process can take sometimes between nine or 15 months. So if we have a really, really new topic, there might be a lack of research. That doesn't mean it's not worthy of research, it's just sometimes, scholarly literature is slow. It's just a slow-moving piece.

 

Otherwise, if you do have a topic that's not recent or really new, but you're still not finding a lot of current research on, at that point, maybe talk to your faculty about what they think, if that is something you can pursue, if there is enough background there.

 

Again, you can take your topic and kind of zoom out to the larger areas of interest and look to see if there is any information about these kind of broader areas of interest, look at the literature and research there, then see which direction the literature is going and then follow with the literature takes you. You might end up with a different research question then you originally set out to do, but it's a research question that is grounded in the literature and that is going to give you that evidence and justification that you need to do your study. It's going to be really hard to do a study if there is no demand for this study to be done coming from the literature and coming from the field.

 

>> JULIE JAMES:  But I would caution everything, if you are not finding anything on it, that might be a good time for you to set up a doctoral research session with a subject specialist librarian. Because you may be stuck on keywords that are not going to find your topic and a librarian can help you work through a strategy to make sure that you are not missing things.

 

>> MEGHAN TESTERMAN:  Another question here, "When you find a gap, wouldn't the literature on that gap be limited?" Yes. Yes, absolutely, it would. Let's go back to our broad here. This is our search strategy that we used. Started with a really broad topic, we had tens of thousands of articles. As we have narrowed down the topic we have gotten less and less research until we got to our gap we had 0 results. So, yes, when you find your gap, will have very, very few articles, if any, that report on that exact topic. That is the nature of a gap. I think with students often find as they start here and then only type that in to the database and they get 0 they think oh my gosh, I found a gap, but now I don't have any literature.

 

So what I am trying to show you here is to start broad, narrow down to a gap so that you have this whole trail of literature behind you closing in on your gap that you can pull from from your literature review that is going to give you the information you need to support why your study should be done.

 

Julie was just answering this question, too. I was looking at this one question about, can I just scan through the abstracts and journals on my topic to find out what has not yet been done?

 

You can certainly try that as a tool. That can't be your entire strategy. But, sure, let's say you wanted to start with marijuana use among my school students. You can actually type that in to the database. Let's actually try it out. Marijuana use, school students, we have unchecked the full text box. We are going to check the peer-reviewed scholarly journals box. We are going to bring up the publication date limiter to 2010. Then we can actually type in to a box here "further research."

 

And what this will do is, it will bring up any research articles that, in the conclusion, talk about suggestions for further research. So yes, if you are looking for a gap, this is a good way to start trying to determine where the field is going, itself. Read where the literature is going, where there is a literature demand for research. What you can do at this point is, once you have an article that you think has a suggestion for further research that you think is really interesting, is you can use citation chaining to see if anyone followed up on that research idea and actually went through and did another study.

 

For example, we can look at this article on prescription opioid abuse. And I am going to copy and paste it into Google Scholar. Once I have the record pulled up here, I will see a link below that says "cited by," and when I click on this, it's going to give me a pretty complete list of all of the books and articles that have cited that article since its publication.

 

So if there was a suggestion for further research in this article, we could have a look at these other studies to see if anyone followed up on that idea.

 

>> JULIE JAMES:  This is really only going to give you the published research. since this is a healthcare related topic, you might also want to go to clinical trials.gov and that will tell you all the research that is in process right now. There's hundreds and hundreds of marijuana studies in process at the moment.

 

>> MEGHAN TESTERMAN:  There's a question about, what do you do if you feel your research is moving into completely untested territory and there is not a body of literature behind it?

 

That's a really difficult situation to be in and one that you should definitely, definitely talk to your faculty about. The guidelines for Walden dissertations are pretty clear that your study does need to be grounded in the literature and come from this body of current research. And if it does not, it's an extremely difficult approach to take, it requires a lot more work than the kind of [indiscernible] we do here at Walden.

 

Again, it's one of those things where the rubric does clearly state that it needs to be grounded in the literature. So if you aren't finding anything on that current topic, you might want to rethink it.

 

So talk to your faculty. Also you can make an appointment with us to talk to a subject specialist librarian to get help in figuring out if there is really nothing on that topic or somehow we can find some [indiscernible] for you.

 

Here's the million dollar question:  "What is the acceptable amount of studies for the dissertation?"

 

So, references for the dissertation or literature review. Unfortunately, the answer really is "as many as it takes." Since I am a psychology librarian, I have seen Psychology PhD dissertations, some that are 130 pages long, some that are 430 pages long.

 

As you might imagine, the number of references varies wildly from one end of the spectrum to another. It really does depend on the body of current literature that is behind your topic. Some of it might be more if it is a well-established topic such as marijuana use among high school students. It might be a much less amount of quality research if it is a newer topic such as police violence or mass shootings or some current issues that we are seeing.

 

Some of the things that you can do to get some guidelines is you can go and have a look at the dissertations that have been conferred that are related to your topic, to get an idea of how long their literature review is, how many references they cite. And then, you can also have a look at our Exhausting the Literature Checklist which will make sure that you have covered all your bases and that you're not missing in the literature that might be out there hiding.

 

Let me pull it up for you and I will put it in the chatbox. This is a checklist that we used for another webinar that goes through a lot of the strategies that we use for finding other literature such as using databases, using citation chaining as I just showed you, using keywords, full text, creating an alert. If any of these are unfamiliar to you, you can follow the link to get more information on how to do that.

 

Here's a great question about articles that have been published in 2018.

 

Just a word of advice, as you are going to the database searches, one of the reasons that I ask that you uncheck that full text box when you start your search is so that you're not missing anything that might have been published in 2018 or 2017 that is still under the publishers' digital embargo.

 

Some publishers have an embargo on releasing the PDF or the HTML version of the article until after the print version has been available for six months, 12 months, they have varying lengths.

 

So what would happen is, if you check the full text box and then you did a search and you found an article that was under embargo, it would not show up as being here in full text and you might not see it. So definitely, uncheck that full text box.

 

Now what happens if you do get in that situation, though, and you want to get the copy of an article that is not available in full text at the library?

 

Well, you could go to Google Scholar and copy and paste the title in there and see if it's may be available freely on the web. You could at least have a look at it.

 

Otherwise, you can go to the library homepage and under services you will see a link to Document Delivery Services. This is just a simple form that you can fill out to request that Walden have a look and see if we can find the article for you from a partner institution. And some cases, we will purchase the article on behalf of a student if it is under a certain amount.

 

While we are here, I should mention that Document Delivery Service does have a limit of 30 articles per lifetime per user. I have only seen one or two students get anywhere close to that, so I wouldn't panic. But I would also be cautious when you're putting in a request to Document Delivery Service. Make sure you read the abstract and that it's an article you're really, truly interested in so you don't get close to that limit. Again, click Sign into DDS, it's a really simple form you file out and the citation for the article you are looking for. That request goes to the collections librarian and then we will see if we can get a copy for you. Either way you'll hear back in about seven to 10 days. We will send you either the PDF of the article or we will say we're sorry, we weren't able to get that for you and will get you some options for looking in maybe your local library to see if you can find it there.

 

What about non-peer-reviewed information that come from credible sources like the World Bank or United Nations publications?

 

Again, that would be kind of within that wiggle room of what is allowed in the literature review. If you have something that is a government report that has a statistic that you would like to include, you can do that. The literature review is mostly a place to talk about the current research that is happening regarding your topic. So usually, you don't see a lot of background information. You will see that information more in Chapter 1. So if you're looking for background information or statistics or government documents, you probably will be using those in your dissertation. You will just be using them in a different place.

 

Here's a question, "How are you getting these subtopics?"

 

Let's see, let me pull up ... these different subtopics. That's a good question. So we started with our area of interest which was drug use among teenagers. We are trying to stay really broad. Really, this was just me brainstorming and trying to think of, how can I narrow down this really massive topic to get toward a gap, to get to some research that hasn't been done yet. I really just started by brainstorming what are narrower terms or what are synonyms to see if I could try to it down. I was able to narrow down drug use to marijuana use, then I was able to narrow down teenagers to high school students into a very, even more narrow population, student athletes, and the most narrow population which was high school athletes in Chicago.

 

There's no right answer, let me put it that way. I trust all of your judgments to start with your area of interest and do your own kind of investigative work to find out what a good, viable, narrower topic would be.

 

>> JULIE JAMES:  We had a great question from Kimberly:  "What if you find a gap that you are approaching the gap in a different country outside the United States and there is no empirical evidence in that country to support your topic. What do you do?"

 

That came up recently with one of my own students and they were very focused. They really wanted to find something in that Nigeria, specifically, and they were having a lot of trouble with that. So we pulled out, to make it a little broader, we said West Africa. And that found quite a bit. If you can go back further in your geography, you may find something that fits your topic.

 

>> MEGHAN TESTERMAN:  That's a great suggestion, Julie. Unfortunately, that is a problem, oftentimes, with International Research, especially if we're looking at developing or underdeveloped countries, that there was not a lot of scholarly research published on all of these topics. And you're right, if you can kind of back out and zoom up a little bit and go a little bit broader, oftentimes you can find enough of the evidence that you will need to explain why there is a demand for your study.

 

There's a question about theoretical framework. So, the theoretical framework, the question is, "How recent does a theoretical framework need to be?"

 

As far as I know, there was not a date limiter on a theoretical framework. You should be able to use, as long as the framework is reputable and has a basis in the literature, then it should be acceptable. If you have any questions about that, that would definitely be a question for your faculty member.

 

We are just about out of time. I want to go to the library homepage real quick and give you some options about where to go to get help. A lot of you had some really great questions and I want to show you some resources that are available to help you get answers to some of those.

 

The first thing I want you to think about in terms of getting home from the library homepage is our Quick Answers. Quick Answers is our University wide FAQ. The library has a really great Quick Answers. You can get to Quick Answers two different ways. You can click the search everything button which will search Quick Answers so you can type the answer right into here. Or you can go to our Get Help section and you will see there's a box right here. We have done a fantastic job making robust Quick Answers for the library. And we have guides on just about every aspect of library research that you might encounter.

 

So let me just show you a quick example. Let's say you find an article in Google Scholar you're not sure if it's peer-reviewed or not. You can just type in "verify peer-reviewed" and you will get a nice little quick guide on how to do that particular thing. Will give you a step-by-step process and even a super short video that really quickly sure how to do that exact thing.

 

So, Quick Answers is really great to get you an answer to a question without having to wait for anybody. But if you do have a question that you can't answer through Quick Answers or if you need some more detailed research help, feel free to reach out to us at Ask a Librarian. We have an email form which is really easy to use. We also have a few chat hours that are available every day. You can also call us on the phone and leave a voicemail. We will respond via email to your question.

 

As doctoral students, you can also make a doctoral student appointment with one of our liaison librarians. Go here to select your college and your school. I will go to my calendar since I'm here. Then you will get access to your liaison's calendar and you can have a look at available, upcoming appointments. We add new appointments, this is the last week of the month [sounds like]. If for some reason the librarian is fully booked for that month, you can also make an appointment with one of our doctoral research librarians.

 

One more thing you want to show you for getting help which is our recorded webinar archive. So, we have a pretty big webinar archive, again, on all things having to do with library research. We also have subject specific webinars. But if you're interested in topics, sorry, if you're interested in literature review specific webinars, you can just scroll through here and you will find that there are a number of ones which look at different aspects, library tips, such as developing a search strategy or staying organized or exhausting the literature. We have webinars that are on citation management software, a lot of webinars designed to help you through the process of doing library research for your literature review.

 

So, I hope that this is been really informative to you and that you will be able to walk away from today's session with a clear idea of where you are in this process and where you need to go and what you need to do to find a gap. Again, if you need any further assistance, please reach out to us. We have a whole team of librarians who are here to help you. I want to wish you all good luck in your studies and have a really good term and a really good semester. Thank you so much and goodbye.

 

 

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Created June 2018 by Walden University Library