Library Transcripts

Video Link: youtu.be/tjIj4K6EiyU

 

Mysteries of the Library: Revealed! Dissertations

 

Begin Transcript

 

Narration:

         

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>>: Okay, it is recording.

         

>>: Thank you so much.  Welcome everybody to the Mysteries of the Library Revealed webinar.  Tonight we are talking about dissertations.  Again, my name is Kim Burton and with me behind the scenes is Andrea Lemieux and she will be answering all of your questions and helping me out tonight.

 

Before we dive into what I want to talk briefly about our mystery series.  We do a  Mysteries of the Library Revealed webinar every month.  It is the third Monday of  every month.  It is at 8:30 p.m. Eastern time unless there is -- of course if there is a holiday it may not be on that day.  We have two upcoming ones for October and  November.  In October we will be talking about finding online information.  So  information outside of the library.  How to find it, how to evaluate it.  And in November  we will talking about full text.  How to access it and different ways of accessing it in the library.

 

Tonight we are talking about dissertations.   We will talk about why dissertations are so  important to you in the research process.   We will talk about how to locate the  different dissertation databases that we have in the library.  And then I want to search dissertations and project studies to show you how to find them.  I will spend a lot of time on there searching in different ways for you to help you find different types of dissertations or projects.

And finally, we will talk a little bit about accessing articles from the reference lists in these resources.

 

So why review dissertations or project studies? Dissertations and project studies are a wonderful resource for doctoral students.  It is the end result, your goal, and you have access to so many of them.  You don't want to overlook this valuable asset for you.

 

You can look up examples of dissertations for your degree or your program and then  you can see how they are organized and how they flow.  When we do this, we want to make sure we are looking at Walden dissertations and dissertations published within the last two years because you want to make sure that you are using the correct format,  template, that it is being in Walden now.  Sometimes things change and other schools  don't have the same requirements as Walden does.

 

You can also find published dissertations for product studies that are related to your topic and then you can see what theory, what conceptual framework or theoretical framework they are producing, what research design they are using, and why they are using that so you may be able to use that in your study as well.  And finally, it is a great resource to find references.  These are people who have just finished what you're doing now.  They have done a comprehensive search of the literature and they have found the best resources to support their studies and most of those resources are going to be within five years.

 

So you can go into their reference list and find resources that you will be able to use  for your dissertation or project study.

 

This has links to the different dissertation link databases that we have here.  I am going to jump out to the Walden Library and show you how to access those different databases.

 

 From the library website you just need to click on the dissertations button right here.  And this is where you can access our different data bases.  I am going to start at the bottom with scholar works.   Scholar works is the institutional repository for Walden.  So this is where you can find published articles from faculty, staff, students.  It is also where you can find the journals from our different programs, all of our different schools have peered review journals and if they are open access here.

 

But it is also where you can find some of our award-winning dissertations.  So if I click on dissertations you will see there is a link for the Frank Dilley award for outstanding doctoral study.  And this is given to a doctoral study that is exceptional in different areas.  So you can see there is some with ED's there are some DBAs in here pick if you are doing a dissertation you would want to look at the Harold Hodgkinson award for outstanding dissertation and take a look at it.  See what's in it.  What they have, how they organized it, what is necessary to be considered an award-winning dissertation  here at Walden.

         

The next dissertation database is ProQuest dissertations, and this is global.  Now, this is not every dissertation or thesis out there.  It is just expanding outside of Walden University to include any open access dissertations.  So anyone who has published their dissertation under open access, meaning that anyone can access it, will be available in this dissertation database.

 

And the top one is dissertations just for Walden.  So this is where we can find all  of Walden's great dissertations.

 

I am going to go in and talk a little bit about searching for dissertations.  There are a lot of things you can do.  You can search for a dissertation that is related to your subject.  It is not going to be directly on your subject because your subject is unique.  But you can go out there and see what other people have researched and see maybe if they have -- if they did some research that is close to yours, they may have resources you can use.  They may have a framework you can use.

 

You can also search by degree and program.   This is really helpful to see how things  are organized and what is expected from you to publish her dissertation.

 

So for instance, if you are doing a DBA, I can type in here DBA and in the anywhere  box I click on there and I will pick degree.  So now it is only going to bring back dissertations or project studies that are getting DBAs.  Let me put a topic in here.  Just so we don't get too many back. Business closures and we would like them within the last two years.

 

I will hit search.  And we have nine results.  The only way to confirm that they are actual DBAs is you have to peek in them.  So if we click on this preview it will pull it up for us and we can go down and we see it is from College of Management and Technology.  And it is for a DBA.  That is how we can confirm it.

 

What if you are getting a PhD and you are getting -- let's say you are getting a PhD  in College of Education Leadership.  So these dissertations, even though they are all from Walden and were written by Walden students, they were not cataloged by Walden.  They were catalogued by ProQuest.  And ProQuest has many dissertations from  many other colleges.  And they don't understand that we have a college of education, that we have a college of management and technology.  So they don't put that in their fields as something we can search by.

 

So we have to figure out a way to tell the database that I want a PhD, but I only want  PhD's from education.  So how do we do that?  The first thing we are going to do is we are going to put in our degree here, PhD.  Click on degree. And then in the second line we are going to type in education, and we are going to tell the database to look for that in the department.  This works pretty well, this would work if in nursing you could put  nursing in here, change that to department.  Or business.  It usually works pretty well  in narrowing down.  Now, it may not get every one of them, but you are going to get  enough.

 

I am also just going to add a row here.   Because let's say you are in -- your topic is on administration and the population you are looking at is high school administrators.  So you want to see what else has been done out there on high school administrators so you can get ideas of maybe a framework, a theoretical or conceptual framework to use, or may be an idea to use of research design that work for other people who were using this population.

 

So I am going to type in here high school administrators.  Put those in quotes  because I just want it to find that term together.  I don't want it to find high on Page 3, school on Page 9, and administrators on Page 305.  I want this as a phrase so when you use quotes it's only going to find those terms when they are right next to each other.

 

I am going to do the last two years and click search.  And I get five results.   This is great.  Now I can go through and look and see what is in there.  I am going to pop in to this one and I'm clicking on the full text because I want to access the entire dissertation.  So the first thing I want to see is to make sure that it is the College of Education, which it is.  And that it's a PhD.  That did work.  Now what I want to do is I want to scroll down to the table of contents.

 

Now that I am here, I can see how this is set up.  How it is organized.  What is going to be expected of me to get to this point, to have a published dissertation?  I can go in here review chapter one, see how it's set up.  Chapter two, the literature review.  I can go down to chapter three, the research method.  Now I want to see if maybe they are using high school administrators as their population as well.  I am going to want to see what design it did and also the rationale that they had for using the design.

 

Let's go back up to the literature review.   It starts on Page 17 and it ends on Page 42.  A general idea of how big it is.  Then you can focus in on some of these topics.  Let's look at the conceptual framework.  This dissertation is using a conceptual framework.  Sometimes you can click on them, sometimes you can't.  So I am going to have to scroll down to Page 13.

The conceptual framework they are using on systems theory.  That is something you have never heard of, but you have worked for them and maybe it's something you are going to want to look into see if it works for you.   What you want to do is read what they are talking about and look for the seminal work.  The seminal work would be the  original work of the theorist, it's usually going to be a little bit older but that is okay.  You can have resources that are older than five years if the research is a seminal.  But you also need recent research as well.  So you can go through the literature review and find more updated articles.

 

There are some article here from 2014.   You can see if there is any more updated  ones or if you keep on seeing the same name showing up you may want to look those  people up.  And to do that all we have to do is go up to the reference link and we will click on that.

 

And this is going to pull up the reference list for this dissertation.  For some reason lately -- I want the most recent first so I choose that and click sort.  It usually works most recent unless the citation isn't correct and sometimes some older ones will be up there.  But for the most part it does list them in the most recent first.

 

So if I go through here to see if there's any articles, I may be able to use in my own  dissertation.  When I am going through, I am looking to see if there is links to access  them.  So this article right here has a full text link.  What I like to do is right click on the link and open it in a new tab.

 

It didn't find it in there.  But that is because probably it did not find it in the ProQuest.  Let's see if we can find that Walden link and see if we can find it somewhere else.  It did.  It found this article in four different databases.  So to access the full text of this article I want to go to the database that has the best coverage.  This article was published in 2015.  So it's actually accessible in all of these databases.  So you can see this is the dates that we have available.  Sage Premier has the best because they go through the present.  But since this one was published in 2015. I will be able to  access it in any of those databases. So all I have to do is click on sage and this is going to bring me to the full text of that article.

 

I know I have been covering a lot of stuff.   Is there any questions or anything that  anybody wants me to show them again?

         

>>: Right now we don't have any questions.

         

>>: Great, thanks.  Let's go back to our reference list.  Sometimes you will see there is a find at Walden link. Here you can try that it.  Again, I like to open it up in a new tab.

 

Again, it found this one.  Sometimes it won't find the article, even though the find at Walden link is.  The reason being is that maybe -- now 20 find it.  I'm trying to find one that isn't working is going to find one.  But sometimes that does not work because let's say we have a journal through 2016 but the article was published in 2018, the databases sometimes can't tell that.  They know we have the journal but they don't know the years that we have access to the journal so you may see that find that Walden link thinks it’s there, but we do not have it.  But that is okay.  Because if you ever come across a resource that you cannot find in the Walden library all you have to do is go to the ask a librarian link.

 

And email us the citation.  Then we will go ahead and we will look for it.  Sometimes we have other ways of finding them.  We will look and see if maybe we can find it  online.  If we can't find it for you, we will send you to our document delivery service.  The document delivery service is a service that the library has and is under services and then student services.  And this is where we will actually pay up to $55 to get an article for you.  Because we don't want you to lose out on research just because we don't have it.

 

There are a couple of restrictions or guidelines you should be aware of.  It does take seven to ten business days and you will receive the item electronically.  So it's free to you but as I mentioned, we only pay up to $55.  If it's more than $55 we may have to find a different way to access it.  There is also a 30 article per lifetime limit.  I would not worry about that; I've only seen this come up once or twice and both times it's been a faculty.

 

Andrea, have you ever seen the 30 lifetime limit come up as a problem for anybody, a  student?

         

>>: I have actually not ever encountered that so as long as students are being critical of what they are asking for and making sure it's relevant to their research, I don't think they will have any issues.  But we did have a question if you want to go back and show one more example.   A student is asking if you can find a dissertation in criminal justice, but it is a PhD.  So maybe just look up a topic in criminal justice and show how the PhD's  will all be the same no matter -- it's all based on topic.

         

>>: Yes, I can definitely do that.   Actually, let's do it.  Let's go up and do an advanced search and I want to clear my form.  So the first thing I want to do is I will put in PhD as my degree. And then criminal justice -- do we have a  topic in particular?

         

>>: Any topic that you can think of.

         

>>: Corrections personnel and retention -- I will do corrections and personnel in there and I will add another row.  And retention.  I will go down for the last two years.  I am looking for criminal justice in the department, I will hit search. I get for results.  Let's go into the full text of this one.

 

I will scroll down.  Doctor of Philosophy criminal justice.  You can do any -- you can put in anything here.  All you have to do is have the PhD for the degree and criminal justice as the department and you can put in any topic or concept that you want to focus in on your area.

 

I am going to go back into that PhD and jump into the references again.  Just to show you another way to access some of these articles here.  Here again, find that Walden link.  Some of them we can click on the full text to access those articles.

 

Sometimes we don't have an article.  So every once in a while, you will see there is nothing there.  There is a URL but there is no link to it.  Let's say we don't have this one at the library.  One thing we can do is we can take a copy of the title of that article and go back to the Walden library and I am going to go look this article up in Google scholar.  I always access Google scholar through the library.   So I click on start your research and then Google scholar.

 

So now this Google scholar box is linked to the Walden databases.  And anything that  Google scholar finds that is available at Walden the find at Walden link should up here.  So here's the article and you can see there is the find at Walden link we have in this article in our library.

 

You can also see that there is a PDF, that means it is available online.  I will open this up in a new tab.  This is going to bring us to that article in research gate.

 

With a slight word of caution.  If the find at Walden link is there use the find at Walden link.  Research has in the past has got me in trouble for posting articles that they did  not have a complete copyright for, and you want to make sure that you are accessing  all of your articles correctly.

 

So if that find at Walden link is there, definitely click on that.  Sometimes -- let me just see, I just want to pull up some different articles.

 

Sometimes you will notice that there is -- when there is nothing over here, here is an  article or a book, actually, and there is no link here, if you click on the double arrow here a find at Walden will pop up.   I am trying to see if there is an example and, of course, I am not finding an example.

See, there is no find at Walden here, but it did pop up here.  It may work, it may not.   No, it did not work.  But sometimes it does.  So just be aware that if you don't see any links here, no PDF, no find at Walden, try clicking on the area.  Another thing you can try is all four versions.  This is basically saying that Google found four different versions of this article online.  So it's all the same article, just found different places and sometimes you might find at Walden on this page as well.

 

Those are two tricks to finding the full text when you are in Google scholar.  Was  there any questions about looking up resources from the reference list?

         

>>: No.  But if we can backtrack when you are at a good stopping point.  Is there  some confusion over which degrees you can search specifically like DBA for instance?   And which ones you can only limit to PhD?

         

>>: That depends on what you're getting.  Are you getting a PhD or are you getting a  DBA?  You are searching for what you are doing.  If you are not getting a DBA, I  wouldn't bother looking up DBA's.  I only look that up if that is what your program is in.

 

So all the degrees, the specific degrees, DBA, EDD, et cetera, those you can just look up by putting in the DIT and then degree.  If you are in a PhD, you can put in here PhD and then to narrow it down more because the database does not understand that we have a College of Education, that we have a College of Management and Technology.

 

What you can do is say I am in education and tell it that is a department.  Or you could say I am in psychology and that is a department.  Or criminal justice and the department.  And that is just going to focus and into your programs a little bit better than just searching for PhD's.  Because I can search for PhD's on high school administrators but I may be getting some of PhD's from a business in there that I don't want to look at because right now I am just trying to find out how they are organized and I am looking for the flow of it and see what other educational resources that they are using.

Does that clear it up a little?

         

>>: Yes, I think showing that you can limit by department if you are getting a PhD helps.

         

?>: That's what I would do.  One of the last things I want to show you that you can do in these databases is you can search for your advisor.  So sometimes this is helpful  because when you are assigned a chair --  I'm sorry, advisor is the same as chair,  and the databases they call it the advisor.   So when you are assigned a chair you are  going to jump in here and see what a published dissertation or project study that they chaired looks like and then you have a good idea of what they expect from you.

 

Also, if you are talking about your chair asking to do something and you're not quite  sure what they are talking about, pull up some of their dissertations and see what  those dissertations look like.  I recommend you do this -- to click on the lookup  advisors instead of just writing in the chair name here.  Click on lookup advisors over here and then type in the name.  So I am going to type in Dr. Wells because I used him as an example, and I will click find.  And you will see he is in here two  different times.  He is in here as Steve Wells, but he is also in here as Steve P Wells.  This is the same person.  I want to make sure that I am getting all of the dissertations he has chaired on.

 

Let me just put in Wells -- when I put in just Wells I also -- I get Stephen P. down here and I also get a Stephen and a Steve.   So I would want to add that to it as well.   But you can see Dr. Marilyn Wells, someone actually had cataloged her as a doctor in  here.  She is in year three times with three different versions of her name.

 

You want to click on each name, each version of your chair's name and click add to search.  And you will see all of them will pop in there.  And go ahead and hit search.

 

It is going to pull up all of the dissertations that he has chaired.  These go all the way back to 2007.  So I think I would do is click on the date range and fo  the first year I will put in 2017.  You don't have to put in an end date because it always goes through the present, we’ll search to the present.  Just click update and it will bring back three.  He has chaired three different dissertations in the last two years.

 

I could go in here and look at them and see what these people did and how it looks.  In  case you want to see exactly what is expected of you.

 

In the PowerPoint presentation I have the links on how to do this, how to look for  degree, how to look for advisor, how to look up your topic as well.

 

I also have links when you are reference mining how to go to Google scholar, so you  are accessing it through the Walden library and how to use the find at Walden link.

 

And that brings us to the end of our presentation.  Was there any other questions?

         

>>: Yeah, there is a few questions I am fielding right now.  Since we are at the end of the presentation, why don't we go ahead and stop the recording and we can stick  around to answer some questions.

         

>>: Before you stop the recording, last slide has a link to our quick answers, ask a librarian, that is where you can email us, ask questions, or send us a citation if you can't find it, we can help you find that article.  And also a link to the live and recorded webinars at the library including previous mysteries webinars.  So you will find all the other mystery webinars that we have done this year in that link.

 

So thank you everyone for coming and right now we are going to stop the recording, but  we will hang out and answer some questions for you guys.

 

End Transcript

 

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