Transcript - Right Resource, Right Time: How to Evaluate Library Materials - July 10, 2018

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcrZ0UJ0UpA

 

 

Begin Transcript

 

Narration:

 

>> ERIN GULDBRANDSEN:  We are at the top of the hour now and we've had plenty of time to see these housekeeping notes. I'm going to go ahead and just move forward and I will go ahead and start the recording.

 

Again, welcome to our webinar, this is a webinar on Right Resource, Right Time: How to Evaluate Library Materials. So how do you evaluate library materials? I am Erin Guldbrandsen, and joining me is Kim Burton. We'll go ahead and get started. I'm going to go ahead and turn off my WebCam. It's distracting even to me.

 

>> KIM BURTON:  So am I.

 

[LAUGHTER]

 

>> ERIN GULDBRANDSEN:  So we can just focus on the content. So what are our objectives in this webinar? First of all, I want to let you know, this is a whole series, really, about evaluating resources. So we've got other webinars that were part of the series. You can see that some of them are archived, you can go back and watch recordings of them. We do have another one coming up on August 7 on a Tuesday, again, at 9 PM Eastern time. It's about, what do you do with things you find on the Internet? So if you want to learn more about evaluating resources, it's a really big topic. So that's why we've broken it down into these separate webinars to cover as much as we can. So please look for that and register if you're interested.

 

>> KIM BURTON:  Erin, I just want to mention about the link for the captioning in the chat.

 

>> ERIN GULDBRANDSEN:  Great. Our objectives for this particular webinar, what we are going to look at his questions, a set of questions you can use to evaluate library resources. There are a lot of different tactics for evaluation and we have a whole guide that goes over a few different, mentioned a few different ways that you can evaluate a resource. But in this webinar session, we are going to look at a set of questions you can use to think critically about any resource you find. Then later, Kim is going to talk about identifying appropriate resources appropriate for their intended use. For instance, if you have an assignment, what would be appropriate? If you just the up to date, current information on a topic what would be appropriate there? So it's like using, how to use the right tool at the right time. If you need a hammer, use a hammer. If you need a screwdriver, use a screwdriver. We are going to talk about resources in that same way.

 

I am going to start going to these questions that we can ask ourselves about a resource to evaluate it using an example. This is the example we're going to use, we are just citing our sources, just showing you the citation for it. But I actually have it already open. We will go to the PDF and take a quick look at it.

 

Here's a PDF of the article from the library databases, I did find it in the library. I've got an the first page here, it shows me where it came from, from the Journal of Political Psychology, I've got all that. I've got the title, I've got all the authors here. I can scroll through and see the whole article. We'll talk about different parts of it as we move along.

 

Let's start with those authors at the top. I've got a little screenshot here to so we don't have to keep jumping back and forth. We've got the authors listed and then underneath their names it tells what their affiliation is. These are some questions you can ask yourself with a resource about the others, what are their affiliations? I see Katharine Greenaway's with the University of Queensland. The next one is at the University of Kent and so on. So I've got all these different people and I see that they are all affiliated with a university. I can't even look up their name and their University and learn more about them and that place where they work, the University where they work.

 

So let's look at last person, I am going to go back to my PDF. It, I hope, will let me quickly grab the name. Let's see here, Nyla, from the University of Kansas, I am going to grab all of that and copy it. I'm going to go over to my browser and this is a great time to use regular Google. I have a Google search box right here. I am going to put her name and her affiliation in the Google search box and I can see yeah, she's a real person, here's the Department of Psychology from the University of Kansas. Let me just open that up in a new tab. I can see that she does work there, I can see what her credentials, I can look at her entire CV here. I can see where she went to school and what degree she has. So she's got a PhD, it's from 1986, but she has her PhD from Purdue University. So this is just giving me a little bit of idea about one of the credentials of one of the authors.

 

You don't have to do this for every single article that you find that you want to use for an assignment. But if you ever do have an article well, wow, this is maybe saying some different things on what I have been reading and some different research. Maybe take a look at the authors, maybe they are affiliated with universities that are kind of known for the research in an area so maybe they are in the cutting edge if it's a school that's really well-known. I am thinking like Harvard Law school or something, you would maybe want to take a look at that and think about what does it mean for this topic and for this article? And you can do that for usually the author. Sometimes if it's a very old article, you may not find much about the author, they may no longer be living, so they're not going to have a web presence. But that is just one tactic you can use to learn more about the research and where it came from. So we saw her qualifications. We could look at the other people.

 

Another thing that's fun is to look at other publications. If we opened up her CV we would probably see other articles that she has written or  the publisher. Who is the publisher of this one? Co-written. That can help you in general with research then find other related articles if you're interested in that.

 

We can also learn about the resource and evaluate it by looking at the publication date. The publication date is going to tell us, maybe if it's really old, maybe new research has come along that has added to this area and maybe this is no longer as relevant as it once was.

 

I was just talking to Kim before we started, I am always trying to come up with new examples for things. I was trying so hard to come up with another example of a resource that we would evaluate for maybe it would be a very up-to-date or current article. And the example I came up with is, I don't know, maybe you have seen this lately in like popular science magazines about how, well, dinosaurs actually had feathers. [LAUGHS] And it's not that people in the past, that we can't learn something from their old research, but that's just the nature of science and of scientific inquiry, even if it's social sciences, research and education, research in all fields. The more we learn, the more research gets informed by that and then new research shows something new that we didn't know before.

 

Again, it doesn't mean we need to throw out the old research and we can't learn anything from it. It's just it may not be the most accurate anymore, because we learn more things. [LAUGHS] It's the nature of science that we are always learning more.

 

Anyway, publication dates are important. [LAUGHS] Because if it's getting old, well, we may have new research that adds to the dialogue that may disprove something entirely from the past or add to the body of knowledge. I know that in a lot of Walden assignments, and if you are a doctoral student at Walden, you're probably aware that you always want to focus on current research which is usually defined as being from the last five years. That's not an arbitrary thing. [LAUGHS] There is a reason why Walden wants students to focus on current research. And that's why, because research is always evolving.

 

Also we want to think about, what kind of publication is this? I mentioned popular scientific magazines that are talking about dinosaurs and feathers. [LAUGHS] There are other types of publications out there. Some of them are popular sources, meaning, not that they're so popular everyone's reading them ... a lot of people are reading them, maybe, but they are intended for a general audience. That's what I mean by popular audiences. They are intended for anyone, it might be sitting in the doctor's office.

 

Then there are things considered scholarly publications. One subset of scholarly publications are peer-reviewed journals. You may be familiar with peer review. Again, that's often a requirement for your assignments at Walden, they want you to use peer-reviewed, current research.

 

Again, that's not arbitrary. There's a reason for that. Because those peer-reviewed research articles, they have been vetted to other experts in that field to so that the other experts are saying yeah, that's good research. They used a good methodology. We can reliably trust the conclusions that they're coming to in this research. And that's the importance of peer review, that other experts have looked at it.

 

If we wanted to verify if this is peer-reviewed or not, I'm going to show you how to do that right now. So I've got the name of the journal, and peer review is determined at the journal level. So this journal Political Psychology, they have peers review everything that they have published, other experts in the field reviewing the articles before they get published, or they don't. It's one or the other. It's not like they are going to say we've got 20 articles this month being submitted, we'll put these 10 through the peer review process but these other 10, we will let it slide. No. They either peer review everything or they don't. So let's look at that journal and it will tell us if this article is peer-reviewed, if that article uses that process or not.

 

The way to do that, I'm going to go to the library homepage. The way to do that, you can go to Start Your Research -- and I'll show you another way to do this it just a moment. And we need it but what it does. We go to start your research and then we click on the actual tool that we use, it's called Ulrich's. It verifies peer-reviewed. So we named Ulrich's Verify Peer Review just to remind you of what it does. This is all you're going to use this tool for. This is all you want Ulrich's for, is to verify peer review. All it does, it's a tool where it lists information about journals, including they are peer-reviewed or not.

 

Let me go ahead and click on that, it's great that on our little search box here that we created, we also want to remind you want to look at the title of the journal and not the article. Again, because I did this article uses peer review or it doesn't. And it shows us exactly what we are looking for here, we want the little referee shirt, because referee is a synonym for peer reviewed. I already forgot the name of the journal. We wanted to look up Political Psychology, so let me just type that in to the list.

 

Sometimes students think they've done something wrong because it gives you a whole long list, it doesn't just give you the one you searched for. It's fine. I see it right here, it's listed multiple times because it's given lots of different formats. The format doesn't matter because again, either they use peer review or they don't. This one, I see the referee shirt, so we know this journal through the peer review process, so other experts read it and said they did good research.

 

Let's move on from publisher information to the content. This is where things get a little sticky because this isn't as clear cut as is it peer-reviewed or not. What are we talking about when we say authoritative and supported by facts? Is the content authoritative? Is it supported by facts?

 

Let's just briefly take a look through the article itself. I do see that they are citing other sources. This first citation actually is citing some of the very authors of this article. So I would want to make sure they are citing people other than themselves. And they are, they're citing other people, not just themselves. They are supporting what they are saying with facts. They are supporting what they are saying with other research, backing up, just like you do, when you are making a point and backing it up with others research. I see lots of citations here.

 

Let me just go down to the bottom and show you that they also provide a "works cited." So anything that they cited here, I can go look up too and see, is that really what they said? Are they accurately paraphrasing them? Things like that. If I felt there was a reason to do that.

 

Now we are not going to sit here and read through this whole article, obviously can't do that in a webinar. But I do want to also point out some of the headings we see here. It's a typical research article. They did some kind of research. It looks like they probably went out and did some kind of a survey and they got results with their survey. So they talk about their method, who are their participants? What kind of materials, what kind of measurement did they do? So it was probably some kind of, the ask people questions. Yep.

 

Then they discuss their results, and they are doing some kind of statistical analysis here. Then they are talking about, if you come down here, they do a whole discussion of what they found and then, that was like a whole other method, they did some research with other methods. Then we have another discussion. Then they should get to, eventually, after all these different things they studied, their conclusions.

 

So they are backing up what they are saying with some research that they actually went out and did, in other words. Again, this can get kind of sticky, though, I would want to read it and see, are they using biased language or objective language? Sometimes it's pretty obvious when people are not using objective language. But sometimes it's not as obvious and I know this is really difficult to talk about sometimes, because we also bring our own bias to things. That's another thing that librarians were talking about lately. [LAUGHS] We might see bias in an article. It's actually pretty rare, I think, to find bias in a peer-reviewed article. That's kind of what the peer review is for, that's one of the things that the peer reviewers look for his bias, and they will reject an article if it does have bias. That's usually a safety net I guess you would say, against bias.

 

But there's another kind of bias that we might want to think about sometimes with evaluating a resource, and I might see bias that we bring to an article. So, am I being overly harsh or skeptical to the facts presented to me because of my own bias that I bring to it? We don't talk of a lot about that here, I don't think a lot of librarians do because it can be uncomfortable to talk about. But again, wonderful example of dinosaurs having feathers, I know when I first read an article about that, reporting on that, it was like a whole paleontology research article because I'm not in that field and I wouldn't understand the article if, probably, I read the research itself. But it was more like a news article from science magazine and even then, too, I was biased. Like, "But I had toy dinosaurs growing up and that doesn't fit the cognitive model of what a dinosaur is. That can't be right." I was really skeptical of it. So I was bringing my own bias of my beloved dinosaur toys to that resource.

 

Another example I have, this was hard, I think, for a lot of people who grew up learning about the planets in school and the researchers said really, Pluto doesn't fit the criteria for being a planet. I think some of us are so maybe having a hard time with that one. [LAUGHS] It's hard to not have your own personal bias, sometimes, to have a knee-jerk reaction to research. So those are my examples.

 

But just getting back to more basics, we also want to look at the information can be verified. Again, usually, that's the beauty of peer review, of using the resource that has been peer-reviewed, is that the peer reviewers have made sure that the methods the researchers used could be duplicated, that somebody else could do the same study, that they are giving adequate information so that somebody else can duplicate the research and then make sure you know this is really how this is going to work out and that the conclusions are following from that research.

 

That we already looked at the works cited, that the really good thing to look for, that that is an authoritative source because they are citing whoever they are referencing.

 

So this is a little bit more about the works cited. We would just want to look through, maybe, and make sure that those sources they are citing are also seemingly authoritative and factual and unbiased sources.

 

So if anything jumps out at you like, they are citing this one article a lot, and they go down to the works cited and read the title of the article and oh, wow, that's really not objective language and it seems really biased, maybe you want to go look at the article then and take a look at it.

 

Usually, again, you don't need to worry too much about this when it is a peer-reviewed resource, because it's usually what the peer reviewers are doing. But there are things out there that are not peer-reviewed that you may end up needing to look at.

 

And I really like to, at this point, also mention, we're not just talking about getting a good grade at Walden on a discussion post. These evaluation skills are really useful just in life to be a well-informed person. And in life, there's no requirement that you only look at peer-reviewed resources. So some of these skills and these questions are going to come in more handy perhaps in other scenarios even outside of Walden.

 

These are just the questions kind of broken down, who wrote it? What was the author's background? Could that author potentially be biased? Where are they affiliated? What university where do they work? For instance, I know I have seen some, this used to be more of a problem, some pharmaceutical research where oh, look, that person, if you dig, one of the people that's listed as an author actually works for a pharmaceutical company who has made that. Anyway, just things like that.

 

How old is it? Could it have been added to or even disproven by more recent research? So if it's getting a little older, maybe look and see if there's something you were. Make sure it agrees, still.

 

Who is the intended audience? I didn't really talk about that too much yet. I mentioned popular sources, those were general sources that are for everyone. Is it intended, is it in a science magazine that anybody would pick up in their doctor's office or is it a really scholarly source that's peer-reviewed content might be full of jargon that I may not understand in paleontology. [LAUGHS] And does it cite sources.

 

We do have a link here to an Evaluating Resources Guide. But I think we're going to hold off and show that at the end.

 

One other thing I wanted to show you before hand it over to Kim is again, to verify peer review. I went to Start Your Research to start that. There's another way to do it would like to show that's right on the library homepage if you just click on "search everything," and you can't remember how to get there you just type in verify peer review. And what will come up as this Quick Answer, it's like a frequently asked question, "How do I verify that my article is peer-reviewed?" If you click on that it will link you right to that tool so you don't have to go through all your research if you can't remember how to get there. You can just use that main search box but you do have to change it back on the homepage to search everything. As long as you remember what it is you want to do, verify peer review, it will get you there. I said I would show you another way, that was the other way.

 

I will post right now and see if there are questions about anything I talked about before I hand it over to Kim.

 

>> KIM BURTON:  No, there aren't any questions.

 

>> ERIN GULDBRANDSEN:  Great. I will go ahead and I will hand it off to you.

 

>> KIM BURTON:  If you can just let me know when you see my screen.

 

>> ERIN GULDBRANDSEN:  You got it.

 

>> KIM BURTON:  Awesome. So now that we know how to determine if a resource is accurate and reliable, the next thing you need to know is when you can use that resource. The library has some recommendations to help you decide when to choose a certain type of resource over another.

 

Before I get started, I just want to say that again, that these are recommendations and guidelines. You should always refer to your discussion post or your assignment discussions or classroom rubric for specific requirements. You understand a little more about that as I'm talking about some of these resources. I am going to talk about the different types of resources they are and when it may be appropriate to use them and when it may not be appropriate to use them.

 

The first one I'm going to talk about are books. So, books are great. There's a lot of information in books. They're bigger so they can hold more information. [LAUGHS]

 

Books are also older. It takes a while to go through the publication process. First you have the author collecting the information, drafting it, editing it, going back-and-forth with the publishers. Then if it's a physical book, it has to be put together, bound, then sent out to the consumer. And this takes a lot of time. So obviously, the material in there is going to age.

 

So books are really good for things about background information, general knowledge on information. And also history on topics.

 

There's two different types of books are really want to talk about. Textbooks, which provide a broad coverage and scholarly books, which provide a more in-depth coverage.

 

So I just have two pictures of book of here. One of them is a textbook and one of them is a scholarly book. But you wouldn't know that from just looking at them. You would have to actually open them up and see what's in there. I could tell you about this Qualitative Research textbook that I have here. The purpose of this book is to provide information on the concepts covered in that course that you're taking. So it's purpose is to help you learn these concepts. So it's going to have a lot of coverage and just give you a little bit of information about everything.

 

Textbooks are really good for background information, to give you those general ideas, to help you see without there for theories or maybe of research design or methodology. This book here on Qualitative Research is going to give you a lot of information about different types of qualitative research. So it's going to talk about case studies, focus groups, interviews. I checked on this book and it has 50 pages on conducting an interview. So it's just a tiny, tiny part of this book.

 

The next book, interview groups and individuals in qualitative market research is an example of a scholarly book because it's taking one thing in going really in-depth. As opposed to the 50 pages of conducting an interview in a textbook this book is 172 pages just on conducting interviews. So you're in the textbook, you read about qualitative research, a little bit about interviewing, you want to find out more about it, you can go get a scholarly book about this. Scholarly books are great because they have that in-depth information, but they are also a great source for primary information on many theories. Many theorists have had their seminal or classic works published in scholarly book. So that's where you can go and find those.

 

Now let's say your instructor is asking for a peer-reviewed source to support your weekly assignment. In this case, you would not go to a book because books are not considered peer-reviewed. They don't go through that process that Erin was talking about before, because that would just take way too long. They are already having to go to the publisher and the editor, that's not considered scholarly, peer-reviewed that some of these scholarly journals have for their articles.

 

The next thing I want to talk to you about are journal articles. And this is where you are going to do most of your research in one area in here. But I want to mention there are three different types of journals going to talk about. Erin had covered some of these. We have your popular magazines, trade publications, and then your peer-reviewed, scholarly journals. And all of these resources have their own characteristics and their little niche in the publication world that makes the beach important resource for different reasons. So you might want to use a popular resource for something or you might want to use a peer-reviewed for another.

 

So when do we use this? Let's talk a little bit about some popular magazines. Popular magazines are great for current information and also popular opinion of a topic. And I'm talking about magazines such as Time or Newsweek. I'm not talking about tabloids or gossip magazines.

 

I am going to pop out and show you the website for Time magazine. This covers a broad, broad range of topics. We have politics, world news, health, entertainment, business. It's just going to talk about what is happening today. So it's very current, it's good at finding current information, it's published biweekly. So sometimes when a story comes out and they are reporting on it, in two weeks, they are going to have more information to report on about it. So they're going to be able to provide additional information to keep you up-to-date on what's going on.

 

It's also good for looking at opposing opinions on events and things that are happening in the world. There's some editorials, people writing in and they're showing one side of the story as well as the other.

 

But you have to be careful, this is when those questions that Erin was talking about come into play again. You want to start asking questions about biases, about the bias coming from the writer or if they have an agenda or the actual publisher might be sponsored by a private organization, so they may have their own agenda when they are publishing  these magazines. So you have to be a little careful about that.

 

It's also important to remember that their main purpose is to entertain. This is what you're going to find at the doctor's office so you can pick it up want and browse through it while you're waiting for an appointment, or getting your hair done. You want to make sure, since is for entertainment, you want to make sure you're checking for accuracy. Are they making statements, are they telling you what they're getting it from, or at least point you in the direction you could go to find out if the information is correct?

 

The next journal we talk about are trade journals. This is an example of a trade journal called Nursing Times. The purpose of a trade journal is to inform the reader of things going on in this field. Many journals of fields, education, nursing, they all have trade journals. This is a great place to find background information. It's also a great place to find emerging trends or developing research in your area. You want to go and see what they're talking about. A lot of them have news links, some of them have blogs where you can see what's going on. Look at the advertisements. A lot of professional organizations advertise their conferences in trade journals. These conferences that these professional organizations are hosting, people pay money to go to those because they want to learn what's new. They want to find out emerging trends what's going on in their field. So these advertisements for upcoming conferences are going to have the most interesting things going on right now in the field. These are things you want to be aware of, you want to know what's going on especially if you are doing a doctoral or a projects study. You want to be able to know what's going on in your area.

 

This might even be a great place to set up a journal alert. On this slide there's a link to the guide that talks about setting up journal alerts where, whenever Nursing Times is going to publish a new issue, they will send you an email with the table of contents and links to articles coming up in their next issue so you can go look at those. That's some of the reasons you might want to use a trade journal.

 

But you might not be able to use this for discussions posts assignment or your capstone research, because trade journals are typically not peer-reviewed. So if your assignment guide or your rubric says you need peer-reviewed, scholarly articles, then you're not going to get that out of a trade journal.

 

And that brings me to the third example, the peer-reviewed, scholarly journal. I am just going to pull up here the American Journal of Education. Look at this, this is their website. When you access the journal articles you're going to be accessing them to the database. I just want to show you what their online presence looks like and they go over here and look at the Time online presence. Look at the difference. This is flashy, this is attractive, you want to click on the buttons and see what's going on. This, not so much. [LAUGHS] They are about business. They're talking about the volume and the number of their issue so you can find the issues you are looking for. They're talking about upcoming items, how to contribute and what this journal is all about.

 

This is where you are going to do the majority of your research and coursework when you are relying on these peer-reviewed articles. You're going to be getting them from journals like this. They're going to take up a large percentage of your literature review, as well. What they are not good at, they're not a good source for background information. These articles are written to a specific audience, remember what Erin was talking about when she was talking about those questions that you are asking. You can tell when you are reading this journal articles that they are expecting the people who are reading them to already know what's going on, to be familiar with the background, have that information ready so they can just learn about the research that is emerging right now.

 

And if you wanted to know more about peer review, I know Erin had spoken about it earlier and I'm talking about it now, the last webinar that we did in this Evaluating Resources series had peer-reviewed in it. It was called The Three Ps of Evaluation and one of those Ps was peer review and there's a link to that recording of that webinar on the third slide of this, so if you haven't downloaded it, you might want to go ahead and do that. This is the link right here to set up a Journal alert if you are interested in how to do that.

 

Now when should we use these things? Newspapers, encyclopedias and dissertations. Well, newspapers are great, obviously, for current information. They are published every day. However, that also brings a problem because they may also be the most flawed. Because they are publishing information but they might not have all that information. They are just publishing what they have. So you have to be careful to make sure what you are reading, they might not be accurate. It's not that they aren't telling you the truth, it's just that they don't have all the information yet. What newspapers are also good for is local information. If you are looking at something in your area or in your community, you're going to want to go to where it's being reported, you can find that information. And that's probably not going to be in a peer-reviewed journal.

 

I also want to talk about encyclopedias and dissertations. But before I really get into them I'm just going to pop back out to the library homepage. I want to go right here and I'm going to show you how you can find articles in newspapers, encyclopedias and dissertations. We are going to go up to the Start Your Research and Erin went here earlier to find Ulrich's Verify Peer Review. You click on that and under search by type, with all the different types we were talking about, so here is a link to searching by newspapers or magazines. If you click on that you can see, you can search in a newspaper or magazine, but also tells you how to find newspapers or magazines in the library databases.

 

There's also a link here for searching encyclopedias, so I am going to open that up and talk a little bit about information that you will find encyclopedias. Encyclopedias are great for background information and scraper overview of a general topic. If there is something in your coursework that you may not understand, you can just go out to an encyclopedia. This is a fabulous place to find information on that topic. The Walden Library has a great database called SAGE Knowledge. I will just pop that open. Encyclopedias are really good for filling in the gap also between a textbook and a scholarly book. Let's say you are in a management class in your textbook is talking about all these different theories and one thing they mentioned is impression management theory, and you think that sounds interesting, but I'm not sure, I need to know more. So let's go type that in. "Impression management theory." We will type that in our encyclopedia database and we are going to get a list of results about impression management theory. This is going to be everything about it but it is going to be more information. It takes us information and take [indiscernible], concise explanation about it. This is a good place to go if you are looking for more information on a topic.

 

You can also use encyclopedias in an assignment if you are asked to get a scholarly definition. But double check, sometimes you are asked to get a scholarly definition from a peer-reviewed source and encyclopedias are not peer-reviewed. So you would have to double check to make sure it would be an appropriate place to get a definition. But encyclopedias have a lot of information on the research process and you can learn a lot from going in there and seeing what they have.

 

Now want to talk about dissertations. Dissertations, we are going to access the same way we accessed Ulrich's, encyclopedias ... on start your research, you going to click on Dissertations. Dissertations are a category all by themselves. We are going to go into the dissertations database.

 

As a librarian, I think dissertations are extremely important to your research. But generally, you are not able to use them, especially in something like a dissertation or a project study, because they are not peer-reviewed. Again, there's always exceptions, you have to double check your rubric, you have to double check your assignment instructions and guidelines to make sure.

 

Dissertations are a great place for you to go and find other information. It's a great learning experience, you can search dissertations by degree, so I can search for just EDD by typing in EDD and then clicking Degree.

 

We can search by topic, I am interested in higher education, and we can also search by advisors or authors. I can just type that person's name in here and then add him to my search.

 

So now, I have dissertations from my degree on my topic that my advisor advised on. And I can go in here and see what theories they used, what type of research design they use. I can go in and see how they organized it. One of the greatest things I can do, if I get something very recent, I can go in and click on the References. And it will bring up all the references that this person uses. Again, this is not that current, this is 2015. But if you find one that was published just last year or even the beginning of this year, there would be a lot of resources in there you could use for your own research.

 

Dissertations are not a great place to go for background information. They are assuming that you understand the topic. They are assuming a gap in the literature or gap in practice and they are showing how their study is filling that gap and. Also as I mentioned, they are not peer-reviewed. If you need a peer-reviewed source you would not be able to cite dissertation. But you can come to the reference list and you something from here if it's applicable, if it's peer-reviewed and it's current, you will be able to use it and whatever your assignment is that you're looking for.

 

So that brings us to everything I had to cover. I did have a poll that I wanted to try, just some questions to see if maybe you guys were, if you could help me answer these.

 

So I have two polls for you. This is the first one. Your weekly assignment needs five recent peer-reviewed articles to support your analysis. Where would you go to find those articles? I am just going to let this go for a little bit.

 

>> ERIN GULDBRANDSEN:  And you actually want to click right on your answer. Sometimes people haven't gotten to do a poll yet on one of these webinars before, so I always like to let them know, you actually click right on the one that you want to choose.

 

>> KIM BURTON:  All right, it looks like everyone got that one right. So I'm just going to close that. Very good job.

 

>> ERIN GULDBRANDSEN:  For people who didn't answer it, what was the right answer?

 

>> KIM BURTON:  The right answer was the peer-reviewed journal. Good job.

 

>> ERIN GULDBRANDSEN:  Everyone who participated got it right!

 

>> KIM BURTON:  All right, so, I guess we can talk about the next webinar in this series that's coming out. That's going to be month on August 7 at 9 PM. It's on "What about the Stuff I Find on the Internet:  Knowing When to Use and Trust What You Find on the Internet." This is a direct link, if any of you would like to register for that webinar.

 

>> ERIN GULDBRANDSEN:  I am going to go ahead and stop the recording, but we will have plenty of time for questions. So I will go ahead and stop that now. And we did get one question that I wanted to answer to everybody because it was such a great question. Someone asked how would they go about finding trade journals? That's so great, because that lets me know at least one person is interested in finding trade journals in their area. We've convinced them, Kim, we've convinced at least one person that that's a good idea.

 

>> KIM BURTON:  Awesome.

 

>> ERIN GULDBRANDSEN:  Like Kim said, it's a really good way to stay abreast of what's current in your research area. What are areas that need more research? That can give you an idea of what's up and coming out there, or if you are a doctoral student looking for a dissertation topic, it could help you get an idea for more research.

 

How to do that, there are a lot of different ways you can do that. You can kind of browse journals by clicking on Journals. I also want to mention, if we get too far into anything, I want to mention all the different ways I would tell somebody to do it. I would suggest browsing by Journal. You obviously, then, are going to have a variety of journals. Peer-reviewed journals, non-peer-reviewed trade journals. If you go into a subject specific databases, you can usually do like a topic search and then limit your search to trade journals. I know the ProQuest databases let you do that.

 

I forgot to tell people what we do, Kim. I'm one of the liaison Librarians to the College of Health Professions. So I'm most familiar with the Health Science resources. And Kim is one of our Liaisons to the College of Education. So that's why she used education examples. [LAUGHS]

 

I know in ProQuest health and medical collection, I would just go in there. I would have summoned you a really big, broad, general search. And in that database you can limit to trade journals under publication type. Just look on the screen somewhere under databases, look where it lets you limit to trade journals. It might be under a scroll box, but it will be there in most databases. Then I would just have someone do the search, they will get articles, then, look at the articles and see if the same trade journal is coming up over and over again. When you're looking at results, you can see the journal each one comes from. Just look and see, what are the journal names that keep coming up over and over again. If you want to go the easier or more exploratory routes, this is a time when you could use just regular Google and go to the Google search box and type in "education trade journals," and you're probably going to get those websites.

 

Like Kim said, trade journals usually have a really good web presence, usually have advertisements, things like that. So you could probably just find them that way. Once you have the names of some of them, we don't want to have you pay to have a subscription to those, so let's say you do education trade journals, get the names of them, they go search for them in that journals area by title so then you will know if we have access to fulltext articles from the journal, and then you can just look at them in our databases instead of paying for a subscription to their website.

 

>> KIM BURTON:  Right.  Why don't I just go in to here and I can just show you, is it under ...

 

>> ERIN GULDBRANDSEN:  Do ProQuest. It will be right there under nursing. You get an advanced search screen. Just as an example here, if you look down, there's like three different boxes and source type is one of them. If you scroll through, I think they have, yup, trade journals right there. Again, you would want to do some kind of a broad search. Let's say you're interested in nursing leadership. So, anything to do with leadership, we should get plenty of results because I'm making that so broad. [LAUGHS]

 

Then, I would just look through and see if any trade journals are coming up, if the same ones are coming up over and over again, then that's when I will probably want to keep an eye on.

 

>> KIM BURTON:  We can also scroll down to publication and it's listing the different publication titles we have, so you can go in and look these up and see if they are trade journals.

 

>> ERIN GULDBRANDSEN:  Try that with whatever you're interested in in a database that's specific to your subject area. And just look on the search screen when you go in to a database, look for just any place you can limit the type of publication that you are searching.

 

That's a really great question, so thank you for asking that. And I don't see any others. This is your chance. We've got a little more time left if you want to submit a question, we won't say your name or anything like that. [LAUGHS]

 

>> KIM BURTON:  We do have links on the last slide to the Evaluating Resources Guide. The guide from the Academic Skills Center about critical reading skills, a link to have to verify peer review is also a link to the Writing Center's guide on avoiding bias. This guide is actually based from the authors point of view, if you are writing how you avoid your personal bias. But it's a good read to see, when you're reading another article, if they are doing any of the things that are mentioned here.

 

>> ERIN GULDBRANDSEN:  Yes, that is a really great guide. And I went ahead and put a link to our Evaluating Resources Guide in the chat area so you can click on that link and get to it. And I can show really quickly to get to that guide, if you don't mind if I steal the power away from you. [LAUGHS]

 

>> KIM BURTON:  Go right ahead.

 

>> ERIN GULDBRANDSEN:  Here, let me just show my screen. So starting on the library homepage, I'd like to show this because they are actually a lot of different guides on a lot of different topics that you may find useful. So starting with the library homepage, you would click on Get Help. We consider this helpful. Then it will take you here and there's an area that says build library skills. You click on library skills guides. These are kind of like toolkits, you can think of that that way too.

 

Once it takes you to the library skills guides page, you can see all the different research help topics that we cover in different guides. So here's evaluating resources, but we have so many guides on so many things. We created these. I think sometimes students think we have just like paid for these or something. No, we made these ourselves. We put a lot of time and effort into them. [LAUGHS] So please use them. And we do click counts of how many times they get clicked on. The least used one is in jeopardy of always getting axed.

 

Here's the evaluating resources one so you can see over on the left there are different sections of it. And a lot of it is reiterating what we covered in this webinar, so like different publication types, how do you know what's a journal, what makes it different than a book. Like a lot of the things that was going over. And when you might want to use those different types of resources.

 

We do have just a whole section on evaluating websites. Our upcoming webinar in August about evaluating things that you find on the Internet. A section about how do you know it's the right source for the right time. And this is what I mentioned at the very, very beginning, evaluation methods, used a series of questions to help us evaluate that article. But there are other approaches to evaluating. So at first this is like what we covered, who's the author, where do they work, what else have they written, who is the publisher, all of that. But if we come down to the bottom, you will see that there are other methods that we could use. Some of them have a fun little acronyms to them that you can explore. They're just different ways of thinking about evaluation.

 

So there's no right or wrong way, method. Different people, usually librarians, have come up with these different methods to help students know how to evaluate a resource. But the main take away is that you want to think critically about what you have found. And yet, not be too skeptical of what you found, because that might mean you are being biased. But yeah, these are just some other methods you can check out and see if they make sense to you or maybe to explore melding them together somehow. I am always interested to see how other people approach evaluation.

 

The new last thing I want to talk about before we let you go if you're done, don't have any more questions, to get help if you are, I'm shy, I don't like to ask questions in front of other people, so if you have a question about this webinar or anything related to using the library, please don't hesitate to use our Ask a Librarian service. We really are here to help you. So if you click on Ask a Librarian, it will give you all the different ways you can get in touch with us. No matter how, if you get in touch with us through email, we will get back to you within 24 hours. It's usually faster than that, but we say 24 hours. And we do have a chat service. If you wanted to chat with someone without anyone else around reading or seeing your question, you can chat with someone even right now if you wanted to chat with a librarian. Our chat times are a little different every day, so you can check that to see when we would be available. But I always like to point that out, librarians usually become librarians because they want to help people. [LAUGHS] So this is the way to get help.

 

I don't think anyone else has any other questions. Well, I appreciate your attendance and your attention. And you get in touch with us if you want to ask us anything in the future. Thank you, and look for the recording in your email that you used to register for the Webinar. Thank you, goodbye.

 

>> KIM BURTON: Bye bye.

 

 

End Transcript

 

Created June 2018 by Walden University Library