Library Transcripts

Video Link: https://youtu.be/cM-poxe1Lic

 

Introduction to Researching Theory for Business & Information Technology

 

Begin Transcript

 

Narration:

Good afternoon everybody. I just wanted to show my face really quickly and say hello. I guess it could be good morning depending on what time zone you're in.

My name is Audrey Butlett-Swenson and I am the Liaison Librarian to the College of Management and Technology. My face might be familiar if you have seen me at Residency, or if you've been to another one of my webinars, or if you've bee on one of our subject pages in the Library.

Today we are going to talk about researching theory for business IT. I know there is a lot of overlap and the concept is very similar. A lot of the examples I will do will be focused on business. If there is something you would like for me to repeat or slow down or you want me to clarify something, but that in the questions box and I would be happy to get to it. While we are doing the webinar. If it's something off-topic I might follow up with you after the webinar. Today's webinar will be recorded and anyone who registered will get a link to the recording. In the future, if you are unable to attend, please know that you are welcome to sign up. I just wanted to show my face. I will turn that off. On today's agenda we are going to talk about library resources. We are going to use that as an example of where to go to search for theory. We are going to do some sort examples. One will be in our databases and another is a Google scholar's.

 

And using encyclopedias to search for information. Theory isn't always a straight line. Sometimes it's hard to tell how it has evolved over time. Just like I said earlier, if anybody needs me to slow down or repeat something, put that in the questions box. Today we are going to go into the Walden library. You will see that I have my Google scholar tab open. I'm not going to go into every single resource we have, I just want to show you that you can contact us. So if you are research, theory, and you need help, there is a couple options for you. You can email us and chat with us or if you want to talk with me one-on-one. If you don't see a day and time that works for you, just know that you can email me directly. So that's how you can contact the library. The next thing I want to point out is our business and management section. Both of these are going to be relevant for what we are doing today. If you are researching a topic that's not just with those two categories, you can spend time with health sciences and human services.

 

Business management, there is a picture of me and what I look like when I am not being quarantines. This is the business management homepage. I'm going to run a search in one of our business databases to show you how this works. I think one of the things that is confusing is how do I get a perfect list. I wish there was a database that can provide you a list with every topic that's out there, but unfortunately it doesn't exist. There is a list out there, but the easiest way to develop or find those is with topics. First, we are going to go down to this section. There is a little bit of content in here. That's getting updated so that will change soon. Then there is some information about searching articles for your topic that's going to be covered today.

 

This guide is something I created because there was so many questions about researching business theory, and this gives an overview of what we will be discussing today. As far as the follow-up, if anybody joined later, recording of this webinar will be sent out in the next 24 hours and as part of that follow-up, I will put a link to this guide. Some of the things we will be talking about today is searching Google scholars and our databases. All of that information is actually here and one of the trickiest things that comes up is looking for theorists. Some are easier than others. Searching for that content is pretty easy and there is some theory that it may be brand-new or change names or might be expanded.

 

It's not always a straight line and I always print that up because even when I am helping students, I have to spend time in the databases to use Google scholar to skip through it. And the other thing I have on here searching Google scholar for a specific theory is really helpful because you are getting that broad picture for it. Just because the databases give you a view of the theory doesn't mean that it gives you a linear timeline. There is plenty of articles discussing the theory, but it's a little bit harder to that broad picture. We will talk about using the libraries and encyclopedias and handbooks that I just want to show you what's in here because it is a lot of what we will be talking about today.

 

If you've already attended residency, basically this is just an Excel spreadsheet you can use to help keep track of the different articles you read. Just know you don't have to do it, it's just there for your reference. I am going to pop out of here and head back to that research homepage. For anybody who might have showed up late, if you have any questions or need me to repeat something, that's fine. Let's start off with a sample search. Every once in a while, I will have a student asked me why do you pick that? Is that the best database? I think it has the clearest interface. So when I am showing you guys, I think it is the easiest to follow along with. All of these databases have great content and you can run similar databases.

 

You can start with a really broad topic. For any demo I play with turnover. Let's go ahead and check mark peer reviewed. Normally I would have you uncheck full text, which you still could. I just want to show you why you might not want to do that right away if you are looking for theory just because you want to find articles that are full text so you can start collecting the information faster. It's up to you how you want to do it. So it's going to show you everything that's in the database. You might be able to find articles in another database. I'm going to go ahead and run this search. So we have 7700 articles on employee or labor turnover. And that's a lot to sift through. If we want to make it more narrow, we can narrow it down. And now we are down to 1600.

 

If you had a third topic and you wanted to narrow this down, you could. You would come in and find articles that are relevant to you. The easiest way to do this is if you are able to, you can do a browser search or if it's PDS, you can do a PDF search. Most of the time. The theory is going to be in the introduction section. They might have a different section that talks about the research method, but you can search through it just to make it go a little bit faster. Looks like they are using context emergency theory. So if we wanted to learn a little bit more about that, I'm sure they are discussing it further down and put that in your list of theories being used related to your topic.

 

 

A lot of times you will be asked for opposing theory. If you're talking about literature, a lot of times the author are going to talk about what they are using and what they are not using and why. So 1600 is still a lot to go through. It's not always linear. I just want to make sure I get all the articles for my previous example so we can go step-by-step. You can also put in theory as one of your search terms and that will help you find articles that's actually discussing that term. It might be a subject term. And I will show you exactly what I am talking about. Let's find one that has theory in a subject term. If it's a more popular theory, a lot of times you might eat it in an index. Actually seen one that was improperly indexed but you can take a look. Sometimes these aren't actually databased terms. This is a term that the author had used, probably because they figured somebody would be looking for that particular theory. Sometimes you will see the theory as a subject term or keyword, or it might be posted in their abstract. The tricky thing about researching. Is that not all of the authors are going to discuss their theories in the abstract. So you might be missing some of them by adding theory and you can expand this by saying framework or model.

 

Just for this demo, I'm just going to do theory. Just know that you can expand this depending on what you researched and what you use. If you have attended any of my previous webinars talking about short skills, putting, or is going to look for either one of these. So it's running multiple searches at the same time. So I just wanted to give you an overview of why I did that search. I'm going to change this to subject terms, and that's going to look at theory. So I'm going to click search and you will see them pop up. Control theory and economic theory. Let's do economic theory again.

 

This one has been tagged with agency theory and I went in here and didn't see agency theory discussed. The more popular ones will tend to be indexed. A lot of the more popular psychological theories tend to be in there too. In the introduction, you will see that they are talking about the conservation of resources. Read if you went through their content. You are going to get more information about this particular theory. Hopefully they are giving you context for why they are using that theory and who the authors would be. Looks like they have a few citations. You should be able to come into their references. That's something that's helpful in the database looking for articles. It's not always a perfect straight line, sometimes authors don't talk about the work and that's when I suggest going over to PDS>

 

So if you're feeling stuck looking through the article themselves, encyclopedias are great, and I will show you how to get to them. We are actually going to search for this particular theory in Google scholars as well. From the home page you will see a button that says publications. Click on that and on the bottom of the list. You will see encyclopedias, handbooks and dictionaries. And then we have a few resources here. The Gale eBooks is great but for this I'm going to use SAGE knowledge. I could probably do a three-hour webinar on SAGE research methods.

 

So I'm going to go ahead and search for that theory. Get a little bit more context for it. You will see that our theory pumped up as the first results. Not every theory is going to be in SAGE knowledge. So don't despair if you don't find it there. Reach out to the library and make appointment to me and can work this out. But a lot of them are in here. So it gives you a little bit of a timeframe and some citations. So it can give you context. I'm not totally familiar with this theory and it looks like this particular author is this theorist. I'm not going to say for sure because I don't read this whole thing but just know it gives you the kind of context. If you want to read some of the works, the older it is, the harder it might be to get in full text. If we really want one of them and we don't have it in full text, email us and we will try to help you find the full text. You will want to go to services and document delivery services. The reason I say email is first is because a lot of times we are able to find the full text, and this has authority article per lifetime limits. Unfortunately because the copyright law we can get you the entire book. The other thing that might be an option is if you lived closer to a state university, usually public academic libraries have public patrons and you might be able to find work on their shelves. Again, we will give you instruction for that. If you email us. Any questions about the database before I move on? I know it's a lot to absorb in one hour. My email is attached. In this webinar so you can email me directly if you want to

 

So the next thing I want to do is head back to the main page of the library and we are going to look at dissertation. If you want to see what somebody did with a similar research topic. You can look at this, or if you want to search by particular theory, you can do that as well. So you can work back and forth. From the library homepage. If you click on publication, dissertation and theses will be on the left side. You will notice that we have three different resources linked here. This is like a public assessable suppository for journal articles. The dissertations and pieces in Walden University will be very helpful. I usually suggest that they look out Walden specific dissertations. First, nobody can look at somebody who was completed. A document related to your rubric. You might change the date range and if you want to go into the global dissertation database. It has over 3 million documents and you can search by your topic and figure out what is the spread? What is the framework that people use, and what may work for me?

 

If you have questions about which theory will work best, that is a great question for your chair. If you have one and if you haven't been assigned one. I would suggest reaching out to a faculty member and they can give you some clarification. Your chair and your committee are going to be your gatekeepers and they are going to give the final word. Let's go ahead and open up the Walden dissertation database. Let's go ahead and search for that theory. Let's get it down to the last five years. So we have 50 results. Our original search was for turnover. We can add that in here if we want to and narrow it down even further. Put in turnover and that narrows it down to 34.

 

If you want to narrow it down to the degree, you could. If anybody wants me to search by degree type, I could do that but if you open up the dissertations and just click on the full text, they will always tell you what degree they are going for. You have a section for your theoretical framework. Just know, I think your entire lit review is in chapter number two, but the concept is the same. You are going to have a section of part for your theory, go to the theoretical framework section and dig through it. They probably have done a lot of the legwork for you. This is pertaining to a topic that you are researching. We knew we were on the right track and looks like they are moving onto other articles discussing that theory. You can look in their references and go to the section.

 

So we have Hobfoll in there at least four times. Just know you can come in and look at the references. It's nice because you can get context for what they used and why they used it and how they used it. I wish there was a perfect list that would tell you exactly which one to use. If anybody finds that, please email it to me. So that's how you can search for the actual theory and how it is being used. If you just wanted to come in here and look for a turnover, if you search employee turnover in the last few years. That's a really good question. The question is how do you search by author, and how do you search for references older than five years. We will definitely go over that in Google scholar. Google scholar is a lot more easier to use because there is more content. I will keep this open and go back to it. It's easier to get lost. So we did employee turnover, now we have 612. You can change this date range if you wanted to.

 

You can kind of get an idea of what the more popular theories are. You can add more search terms in here to narrow it down. We do have 168, that's pretty decent but searching through the dissertations is pretty helpful. If we went into the global dissertations database and search for that theory, I want to show you guys something that you need to do while you're in here. This has an extra theses in here. I think we had 50. If you want to give more context for that theory in how it is being used for a more broader sense, that is the best way. Now I will hop into Google scholar and give you guys some context. I just wanted to start with the theory, and I will go to the author. If you want to search by theory, we can do that. Just with this. We got about 10,000 results. And that's wise that they will give you a bigger picture on how many used this over the time. The next thing you could do is start to narrow this down. I think I saw that his articles were published in the 80s, so I will start with 1990. So what I've done is I've put this on custom range, and I will leave that first box blank. Anything newer than 1990 is going to be omitted. You will actually see our authors here as well. So we are on a nice track and our dates are published. So we've got two entries and if we wanted to run a search with their name, you could run a search by author. You will see that this authors name is underlined so I'm going to go ahead and click on that and that is going to show you this person's profile page. So everything they published along with how many times it's been cited and the year. This has been cited 10,000 times. But if you wanted to look for something a little new work, you can see, has he published anything along those lines. In the last year or two. So some of the more popular and recent authors have a Google profile page. Some of those older authors were not with us probably have a more older one. So we've gone back in time and we've looked by author. I'm not seeing them pop up. So the next thing we could do is search by the author name.

 

So we are going to put in the author then a colon, and whatever their name is. Since we know this is the name that is displayed, that's how we are going to search. We have 528 articles. So if we wanted to say see everything for 2016, we have that here and now we are down to 429. The year 2000 has 215. That's how you can search by author in Google scholar. You can do the same thing in a database and I will show you how to do that. So we are going to say SE Hobfoll and click on the drop down and we will have an option for AU author. This is good to keep an eye on. If you have an author whose last name is Smith, you have to figure how to redo your search to see what you are looking for. Just know that that is one way to do this.

 

If I wanted to make it more specific, that should narrow this down a little bit. That's how you can search in the databases by author. If you want to. You can do the same thing in Google scholar. The next question was, how can you search for more than one author at a time. If you wanted to see if these two have published more than one article together you would just say author:"SE Hobfoll" AND author:"RS LILLY". there's pros and cons about using Google scholars. If you are new about using Google scholars, put that in the notification box. I am happy to go through and show you a little more advanced searching in Google scholars. While you are looking in Google scholar, once you find those articles that are very popular, we looked at his profile page that had been cited about 10,000 times. So when you see this, you know you have a very important document. So just keep an eye on that. I had a student who said that they are new to Google scholars. You will notice in my search results. I had a Walden link which means that I connected Google scholar to Walden library. They are not something that is provided by the Walden library. To get this, I'm going to show you how to connect it manually and you are going to get that by going up to the left-hand side. I'm going to take my time because I forget how fast I click. So I will go slow. But the bottom of that list. You should see settings. If settings is at the bottom, then we are going to click on library links and in that search bar. We are going to type in Walden University. So want to do that, you will see Walden University listed. I don't know what Google scholars preference is.

 

Outside of the United States. I was working with a student in Canada and they did not have that link. So if you see different resources right here, leave it. What this will do is take you to an intermediary page. The database list is going to tell you what kind of collection access they have, and they are looking at the title and not the actual article itself. There are articles from 1989. All we have to do is click on the database and here is our full text. Some of the articles you're looking for might not be in the business database because they might be in the psychology database. Depending on what you're looking at and what theory it is, so Google scholars is very helpful in that it is going to help you find more content. That is really tricky with theory. Like I said earlier, it's not always a straight line. Google scholars is good for giving you a larger view of how to research theory.

 

I think we have covered everything. Let me just go back to my list. I think I got it. I would just leave the last 15 minutes for questions. If anybody has them. If nobody has any, I will let you go back to work. I appreciate you being here. A recording of the webinar will be sent out next week and it will include a link for that theory died. There will be a survey after the webinar is completed. Please feel free to give positive feedback. I don't see any questions popping up, so I hope you guys have a good rest your day.

 

End Transcript

 

Created by Walden University Library