Library Transcripts

Video Link: https://youtu.be/Cu0V-_iRvmI

 

 

Begin Transcript

 

Narration:

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  Welcome, everyone, tonight, to our Evaluating Resources Webinar Series. My name is Emily Adams, I am one of the Reference and Instruction Librarian's here at Walden Library, and presenting with me tonight is the fabulous Trish Pearson. And we are going to be talking about the Three Ps of Evaluation:  Primary vs Secondary, Popular vs Scholarly, & Peer Review.

 

So that's what we have planned for tonight. We are always excited to talk about these topics. We hope you enjoy it, as well.

 

We will go ahead and turn off our WebCams for now, but we are real people. We are here presenting. And we are excited to talk about how to evaluate resources specifically the whole primary and in popular.

 

We want to start off talking that advertising a little bit our Evaluating Resources Webinar Series. About a month ago we did a webinar on What is this Stuff, to identify materials in the Walden Library. So if you want, you can always go back and watch that. We will show you at the end how you can find the webinar archive you can access that is where we will be posting this webinar as well.

 

Coming up in a month we have a webinar on Right Resource, Right Time:  How to Evaluate Library Materials. That one is going to get into what to look for in the resources you find and had to figure out what you should be using for your discussion posts, what would be better for a literature review, what is more appropriate for background resources. So that is what that was going to cover that's coming up in July.

 

Then, the What about Stuff I find on the Internet? webinar is fabulous. You should go just because Erin Guldbrandsen and Kim Burton present it and they are amazing. [LAUGHS] That's coming up in August and they are going to go over Internet stuff  -- so what you find online outside of the library. If you're interested in any of these please do feel free to register. They should be fabulous.

 

Tonight, what we are going over, our goal is to go over the nitty-gritty of the different types of sources you may encounter during your studies. We are going to talk about primary versus secondary because there will be times you will be asked to find primary sources and will go over how to identify those.

 

We will go over how to identify popular and scholarly sources, that is really important when your professors ask you to find the scholarly source to really understand well, how is that different from popular source? What exactly are they looking for?

 

So we will talk about that and we'll talk about peer-reviewed. We all love peer review. [LAUGHS] Almost all, well, a lot of assignments require peer-reviewed article so we are going to go over what it is and then how you can find them.

 

Hopefully this will be helpful and will really give you a good understanding of these different sources.

 

So let's start off with primary versus secondary. So a primary source is where the person writing about the thing actually did or witnessed the thing. Examples include research articles, first-hand accounts, books with original theories, creative works are also considered primary.

 

So kind of as an example, let's say I presented a fabulous webinar and at the end of the webinar, I surveyed all the participants. I analyzed their results and then I published a research article about what I did and what I found. That would be a primary source.

 

So, secondary, let's contrast that with secondary sources. So a secondary source is where the author reviews or reviews things that others wrote about. So for example, systematic reviews, literature reviews or literary criticism. They are all looking at things other people wrote and then writing about them. But they don't actually go out and do physical research or talk to people. Going back to my example, webinar research article I published, let's say someone else was like, "Hey, I want to know what the best practices are  for presenting a webinar and they go look at 50 primary sources that have been written on people who have presented webinars and done research on them. Then they compile what they found. That would be a secondary source because they didn't actually present a webinar. They just looked at other people who had presented webinars and then wrote about it.

 

Hopefully that kind of clarifies that difference, because I know that can be a little tricky sometimes.

 

Let me talk more about this. Often times in your courses, well, sometimes, your professor will say hey, you need to find a primary source. And I want to clarify that just because sometimes you are required to find a primary source, it doesn't mean the primary sources are necessarily better or secondary are better than primary.

 

For example in the health sciences, secondary sources are often more highly valued because evidence that came from 100 different research studies is a lot stronger than evidence from one research study. So there are advantages to both. There are different types of sources. But it's not that you should never, ever use a secondary source, because that's just not true. There's definitely value  from both of these types.

 

And, primary sources may contain secondary information. In fact, most of them will. Most research studies which are primary sources contain a literature review, where they look at the other research that has been done in the area and they do a short synopsis of the or a short literature review. That's usually the second or third section in a research paper where they just present some context for the research they are doing, what's already been done. And then why their research is important and where it fits in with the scholarly literature that's going on.

 

So even if a source contains that secondary source but then they go on to talk about their own research, the research they did, what they found, then it's still a primary source even though it has that secondary piece to it.

 

Primary versus secondary applies to all types of publication types. It's not just journal articles or books as I mentioned on the previous slide, literary works are considered primary sources. It's not just journal articles, it's pretty much everything.

 

Just because we get this question a lot in the library, primary and secondary have absolutely nothing to do with peer review. Both primary and secondary sources can be peer-reviewed. Peer review is a totally separate thing, that has nothing to do with the source.

 

I don't know if sad is the right word, but one of the struggle students have with finding primary sources is there is no database limiter. As Trish is going to show later on, there's a lovely little limiter in most of our databases, you can limit your results to peer-reviewed. There is no primary or secondary source limiter in the databases.

 

So, you will have to search and really look at what you're finding to make sure that you've actually found a primary or secondary source. There's no easy button for this.

 

But there are some tricks you can try. One that I use, often times, when looking for primary sources as I will include the word "research" as one of my search terms, because research studies are primary sources.

 

So if you find something related their own research, it's a research study, it's a primary source. So that's one way you can kind of limit your results. It if you are looking for secondary sources, my favorite search term is just "literature review." Literature review is for the entire article is a literature review, those are always secondary.

 

So those are a couple of tips on identifying or locating those types of sources.

 

So, Trish, are there any questions about this that I should answer before I go? I'm going to show some examples so we can kind of work through how you would tell from looking at an article whether it's primary or secondary.

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  No, we do not have any questions yet about anything you've talked about.

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  Awesome. So that's going to get an example. I hope this isn't too small on your screens. But what I've got here is an abstract for the article "Picturing Creative Approaches to Social Work Research:  Using Photography to Promote Social Change."

 

So, this article, I pulled it up in the database and this is the abstract that came up. What I love about this is it says, here is the intro. Here's the methods. Here's what they found and here are the conclusions. It's all written up so very beautifully. [LAUGHS] This is definitely, definitely a primary source example. They talk about it. This is what they did. They were given a single use camera. They did whatever it is they wanted to do. This is what we found, this is our conclusion. So this author went out, did this study, published the results, it's a primary source.

 

Let's compare this with this next slide:  "The Tools of Social Change: a Critique of Techno-Centric Development and Activism." One of the first signs that this is probably a secondary source is that it's a critique. So you come down here and you don't see, it's not nicely divided where it says here's our method, here's our finding, here's our conclusion. Basically it says, "This article aims to integrate literatures in order to critically review differences and similarities." All of these are telling me this is definitely a secondary source. They didn't even go out and, I'm not even entirely sure what this article is about. But they didn't go out and do research. They looked at the literature. They read it and they're coming up with conclusions based on things other people have written. And there's definitely value in that because they had findings. They discovered things. But they didn't actually go out and do fieldwork or they weren't out there interviewing people. They were just looking at the literature of what other people had done. So that is definitely a secondary source and those are some things you can look for. Critique, review, or just talks about the literature but it doesn't talk about hey, this is what we went, we went and did this. So that's a secondary source example.

 

So now that I've gone over that, I always feel like it's helpful to try it yourself. So let's try this. Here's this abstract:  "Re-Envisioning Research As Social Change:  Four Students' Collaborative Journey." Here's the abstract. It says, "This article describes four doctoral students' process of coming together to support each other's work. What emerged was a powerful space of learning and a framework on social research for social change. The authors hosted a two-hour reflection session which is recorded and transcribed. Text that session appears in this article along with discussion of key principles of the social change framework, the ways the students came to take ownership over their work and collaborate and guidance for the researchers working against the isolation and competition that is too common in the Academy."

 

So what do you guys think, is that a primary source or a secondary? And I am actually going to go ahead and launch a poll so you guys can tell me what you think. And you can go ahead and click on if you think that's a primary source or if you think that's a secondary source. So I'm just going to give you a few minutes. I know you can't still see the abstract, but it talked about them hosting a two-hour reflection session which, and then they looked at the social change framework to students came to take ownership of their work and then, guidance for other researchers.

 

So I just going to give you a couple more seconds. You can vote. Awesome. I am going to go ahead and close the poll. It looks like most people have voted. I am going to share the results.

 

Okay, awesome. So the majority of you thought this was a primary source. Exactly. The authors hosted two-hour sessions, they went out and did something, and analyzed the results. They look at how students came to take ownership of their work and then they had conclusions, guidance for other researchers who are also working in this -- "in the isolation and competition that is too common in the Academy." So very good, that's a primary source, they went out and did something. They didn't just look at the literature and find stuff, look at research that had already been done. So, well done.

 

With that, I'm going to turn it over to Trish to talk about our other two Ps for tonight.

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  Okay. Can everybody see my screen?

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  I can see it. So hopefully others can.

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  Wonderful, I always like to make sure before I go off on the tangent here. So I am going to be talking about popular versus scholarly and then after that we are going to be discussing peer-reviewed. Woohoo.

 

With popular versus scholarly, when you see those terms, generally people will give you the brief definition, popular sources are written for a general audience and scholarly sources are written for like an academic audience.

 

Some examples of things that are popular sources are magazines and newspapers. So if you think about that, those would be things that you can just pick up at any sort of retail store like your Target or the grocery store or a bookstore, whatever. There's magazines and newspapers there. You can grab the New York Times or People magazine or whatever. Those are going to be things just written for general, ordinary, everyday people. They're not expecting you to have some great background in a subject area. It's going to be general information.

 

Scholarly sources are going to be things that are set up for people who are in some sort of discipline, so they are going to assume you've got some sort of background and some sort of knowledge of that area. So if you're looking at academic journals or academic books, those are going to be written, indeed, for that scholarly audience.

 

So they're not going to make things so simple that you know like your seventh-grade person is to pick that up and say yes, I'm going to read this academic journal and totally understand.

 

So, scholarly sources are not necessarily peer reviewed. Scholarly sources is kind of like the big, giant, overall category that a lot of things fall into. And we are going to be talking more about  what exactly peer review is in just a bit.

 

That always is a little bit confusing, that scholarly is scholarly and scholarly sources does not equal peer-reviewed. Keep that in your head for now. We will get into some of the reasons why in just a bit.

 

Often, when you give these definitions and people look at things that are popular or scholarly, you can kind of guess a lot of times and people are usually pretty right on with that.

 

Often, you don't really know why, though, you're just sort of wildly guessing but usually pretty close. So what we're going to do is we are going to take a look at a couple different examples. I'm going to have you try to think about not only do you think it's popular or scholarly, but why are you thinking that it might be popular or scholarly? And then we are going to talk about some of the different things you can look for when you try to gauge, is this popular or is this scholarly?

 

This, hopefully you can see, it's kind of small, we are going to decide, this is popular or scholarly? And also as you are looking at this and trying to decide, think about some of the things you are using as reasons. If you are saying this is popular, why do you think it's popular? Or if you think it's scholarly, why do you think it's scholarly? I will give you a little bit to look.  We will do this pretty quickly. Then we will kind of take a quick look at some of the different things that you look at for these different categories.

 

Let me go to the next slide. So if you said it's scholarly, yay, you are correct. This is the citation information if you wanted to go later and take a better look at it.

 

Some of the different characteristics that you will see in scholarly sources are that they are citing their sources. And if we, looking at that, you could see that there are a variety of different citations or that in the article itself, it's going to be doing things like defining the different terms they are using. It is, like I said, going to be written for an audience that has some familiarity with the field. So they are not going to assume you have absolutely no knowledge at all. It's going to jump up a level from the general audience.

 

Often it's a primary source. So, often, it's going to be those people who are writing up their own research. They have done their research, they are writing up that information. Not always, because, as Emily showed us, you can have those other things too, like various reviews and critiques and things like that that can be scholarly.

 

You are not going to see ads in a scholarly source, which sounds kind of silly. Sometimes that is a good way to tell the difference if you are a little confused. Because there can be some things that are maybe a little bit gray, but if you are seeing ads in that journal, it is not going to be a scholarly sources.

 

So let's go ahead and look at another example.

 

So, with this example, do you think this one is popular or scholarly?  And as you are looking at this, think about the reasons why, again, you might be thinking it is either popular or scholarly. I will give you guys a few seconds to look.

 

So I will go ahead and go on to the next page. And if you said it is a popular source, you are correct. It is a popular source. So with this, some of the characteristics you might see in a popular source compared to a scholarly source that you don't have those citations or references. So if you think about like when you pick up an article in People magazine or whatever, or National Geographic, National Geographic is a great, popular source. And a lot of times they have articles in there about scientific things. Typically they are not going to be citing all these other scientific studies and all that. They are going to give you may be an overview of an archaeologist that has discovered some crazy, hidden city in Central America or something like that. They're not going to be citing their sources. You are going to see ads in popular sources, because that is kind of how they are generating a lot of revenue. It's going to be written for that general audience. So like with National Geographic, your seventh grader's going to pick that up, use it for a report or just to read, whatever. It's going to be something that is going to be easily read just by a general audience.  They're not going to assume that you need a bachelor's degree in archaeology to be able to figure out what the heck is going on in this article.

 

And in this popular sources, they may talk about different scientific studies, but the authors are not the ones actually did that research. They are going to be people who are going to give you some overview of it or they are going to give you an overview of whatever it is they are reporting on. But they are typically not people who are out there doing actual research. So those are some of the differences then, between scholarly sources and popular sources.

 

So before we move on to peer review, do we have any questions about any of this, Emily?

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  No, I think you're doing great, Trish.

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  Excellent. Let's move on to peer review, because that's what everyone is here for. I know. [LAUGHS] We know, it's the big thing, because this is what you get asked to find. People are like what the heck is peer review, and why do I even care, and what am I supposed to do about it? And for all those fabulous questions.

 

So, peer review is a very specific process that is used only by journals. So if you're looking at a book or a dissertation or some other scholarly thing, it's not a journal, it will never be peer-reviewed. It may be a fabulous source of information. It may be very scholarly. But if it is not using that very, very specific peer review process, it is not considered peer-reviewed. 

 

And it is only going to be articles. Because only journals are using that process. And it is a bit like being pregnant. You can't be just a little bit. Journals are either using the peer review process or they are not. It's all or nothing.

 

So with the peer review process, what happens is, let's say, like with Emily's example earlier, with her webinar research article, so she decides that she wants to submit her research to a peer-reviewed journal. She would send it off to them. They would get it and they would say, "Oh, this looks pretty fabulous, but we don't really know anything about webinars or this whole crazy librarian stuff. So let's send this off to some people who are experts in that particular field."

 

So what happens with the peer review process is that before anything is published in that journal, it goes through a review process, it's sent out to people who are experts in that field or your peers, which is part of for that peer review process comes from.

 

What they do is they go through it and they're not looking at things like, did you spell this word right? That's something that editors deal with, later. What they're looking at is they're taking their expertise in the field and they're looking at your research very, very carefully to see how well did you put this together? Does your methodology make sense? Do your conclusions make sense? If you've got a bunch of analysis and different statistical information in there, does that make sense, too, can they look at it and say yes, this is where you've gotten this from. This makes sense as far as this goes. Do your conclusions make sense? They're looking at it very, very carefully from the standpoint of being experts in that particular area and they're saying this is actually pretty good research and we think this should be published. That's kind of at the end that you really want to be with the peer review process.

 

Often, there's more of a middle ground. So instead of either yes or no, we are publishing or not, typically there can be a bunch of back-and-forth between the reviewers and the author. And with the peer review process, it is typically like at least three reviewers who are looking at it, sometimes more. So if you have ever worked with a committee, you know there's always someone who is maybe not totally agreeing with someone else. Often they will come back to the author and they will have questions about well, we're not quite understanding what you're talking about here in this methodology section. Or some of these results we are not understanding where you're pulling this information and we don't see how this conclusion is coming out, or whatever it is. So they're using their expertise to critically examine how your research is done.

 

So what you have is that back-and-forth, if they've got any questions, then they will recommend either that that research is published in the Journal or that it's not. And if they say yes, we think it should be published after all this sort of back-and-forth which is very, very typical, then yay, your article gets to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. So it is a very specific review process and not all scholarly journals will use that process.  Although there are quite a few that do, there are also quite a few that don't.

 

So as I said earlier, scholarly is kind of the big category. Scholarly can be things like books and dissertations that we know are not ever, ever peer-reviewed. It can also be other journals that choose, hey, we don't want to do that peer review process, because that is a lot of work. It really is a lot of work. But those things that are published in a peer-reviewed journal because they go through this big process of being sort of vetted by experts and then, a custodial editorial process and things, they tend to be very high-quality. Which is why your professors really, really, really like you to use peer-reviewed things. Because they know these are things that have gone through pretty heavy review. So these are going to be things that most often going to be high quality research. And that is why you get asked, a lot of times, make sure it's peer-reviewed. It needs to be peer-reviewed. You need a peer-reviewed article for this or three peer-reviewed articles for that.

 

That is sort of the love for peer review that comes from professors. And as, it's a great process, but it is a very lengthy process. Sometimes, like when Emily writes of her research and sends it off,  the thing is that this whole crazy process in the back-and-forth between all the reviewers and finally decided to get published, it can be more than a year before the thing you submitted actually show up in print. Sometimes a little bit longer. And sometimes journals have backlogs so they can be 18 months or maybe a little bit longer, too. Do keep that in mind when you are looking for peer-reviewed things, as well. Because if you are looking for a topic that is like really, really current, like boom, it just hit the news, chances are pretty good you're not going to find peer-reviewed research. Because as we've seen, this is a really lengthy process. [LAUGHS] So it may take some time, because you have to get how much time will it take for some to actually do the research and write it up, as well. So you've got that time on top of the year, 18 months, or however long it takes to actually get put into print, too.

 

So, peer review is not short. But it definitely is very, very specific. And like I said, journals either use it or they do not use it.

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  We had an interesting question. One student is asking, "Is there a cost to the authors for peer-reviewed?"

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  Okay. Um ... so, most of the peer-reviewed journals that are what I am going to call traditional publishers are not going to charge authors for this peer review process. Because that's just part of like, submitting and they're thinking, we are interested in this. If they are totally not interested they're just going to be like no, too bad, we're not interested, we don't care. So there is some interest there for them to start this lengthy process. The only time that you may end up having a charge to the other, and it's not really for the peer-reviewed process, per se, some of the open source publishers, because they are not like a commercial publisher, so they don't, they're not charging these giants, really giant fees for subscriptions that they charge the libraries. The open source, what they will push is to get things out there so that everyone can look at them and have access to the information without having to spend tens and tens of thousands of dollars for subscriptions to these crazy databases and journals and things like that.

 

So there as an author you may end up paying a fee to publish with this open-source journals. It's kind of tricky because there are some open-source journals out there that may not be quite ethical. So you have to really, really watch for that. There are different ways that you can get into analyzing those. It's kind of outside the scope of this. We can have an entire webinar on academic publishing and open-source and all that kind of good, crazy stuff that librarians love.

 

Typically with like the big publishers, the answer would be no, you're not going to get charged. It's not like if you want it to be peer-reviewed you have to pay, like pay some editorial fee to have someone at your dissertation or something like that.

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  Awesome, thanks for touching on that, Trish.

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  All right. Let's go on. Let's look at how you can limit your search to peer-reviewed articles. Most of the library databases have like a little limiter that you can check. There are some databases that only have peer-reviewed journals and those, typically, you're not going to see the little checkbox that I am going to show you. It's going to be something that is going to be like peer-reviewed or maybe scholarly peer-reviewed.

 

We are going to take a quick look at one of the nursing databases. So, let's look at, like, I will just do a very quick search for heart valve. That's very broad.

 

So let's say, you're putting in whatever search terms you want. We did that just so we have something to search. If you scroll down a little bit, and this is one of the EBSCO company databases. You're going to see further down the page a little section down here, peer-reviewed scholarly journals. So what you're really looking for is something saying peer-reviewed and below that you will see a little box and if you click in the box, put a checkmark in there. So we have told the database we only want to see things that are peer-reviewed, scholarly journals. So it is pretty easy when you're searching in the databases to limit your search to peer-reviewed information.

 

So if we go back up, we have heart valve, we click on Search, we will do a search and anything that we see in these results is going to be peer-reviewed. So if you're asked to find a peer-reviewed article in your topic, you would just break your topic up and put in your keywords in the search boxes and you would make sure you check that peer-reviewed box and  your search will have just peer-reviewed information.

 

If you forget to do that before you do the search, because that sometimes happens, not that I would ever, ever do that, you will see on the left side of the page that there is a little box over here, peer-reviewed scholarly journals that you can check. Since we checked on the first page is already checked, but if it wasn't, we could go ahead and check it here. And that would rerun the search and it would take out the things that are not peer-reviewed. It is really, really very easy in the databases to do this peer-reviewed searching. Some of them may have like peer-reviewed right under the search boxes instead of further down the page. So you just have to look around the page a little bit. If you are really not seeing it, chances are you may be in a database where all of the information is peer-reviewed.

 

So ... all right, let's, back to the PowerPoint.

 

So, Google Scholar, a lot of people love Google Scholar so we always like to talk about this. Google Scholar does not have this nice little limiter like the library databases do.

 

So if you're really a giant fan of Google Scholar and you loved it and you want to do searching there, just keep in mind that there is no way that you can tell Google Scholar only find me things that are peer-reviewed that the library databases will. So you're going to see this big make some things, peer-reviewed things, things that are not peer-reviewed, they may still be scholarly but not peer-reviewed. So if you really, really want to use Google Scholar, and there are times when that is something you might want to do, what you need to do is if you are asked to find a peer-reviewed article you have to verify if the article that you found in Google Scholar is peer-reviewed. And there is a way that you can do that using a handy little tool that is called Ulrich's Periodicals Directory. And, I will show you how you can find that in the library and how that works.

 

The easiest way to get there is if you were on the library homepage, at the top of that page, you will see some tabs that start about the middle of the page. And the very first one is called Start Your Research. If we click on Start Your Research, you will see on the left side of the page a box that says Search by Database. And if you look down a little bit, there is a link for all Ulrich's: Verify Peer Review. We are going to click on that to get into Ulrich's. This is our little search that we can start here. You would go ahead and enter a journal title here. So let's say... let's do a quick search and Google Scholar. We will do heart valve, heart disease, how about that.

 

So here what we would do is, we see this giant list of things and we're just not really sure at all what is peer-reviewed and what's not. And what's going on here. It's like, holy cow. So what we can do is, we can just pick one of these. And as we talked about earlier, with peer review, it's a process that the Journal uses. So even though we call articles peer-reviewed articles, they're really, the peer review process is happening at the Journal level. So, to verify peer review, what you need to do is you need to see, does natural use that process? And if the Journal uses that process, because we know that it's all or nothing, that the Journal is using that for everything that Journal, that any articles published in the Journal are going to be peer-reviewed.

 

So let's see if we can find a good citation here. So this one is actually from The Journal of American College of Cardiology. We are going to steal that. And we are going to go back to our Ulrich's box we got to from clicking on the Verify Peer Review and then it is going to put in the name of this journal. So we check this journal and we find out that it is using that peer review process, then we will know the articles that are published in this particular journal are, indeed, considered peer-reviewed.

 

And what we're looking for is it shows you this last little picture down below that there is that's black and white stripey referee shirt icon. If we see that, we will know that the journal is peer-reviewed. Another name for peer-reviewed is "referee." I think this is a little bit cutesy with the referee shirt, but that's where they are coming from with that. Referee, referee shirts.

 

So we will do the search and we will see what we get for results. Okay. We see American College of Cardiology. Is that the name of it? Too many boxes here. Yep. American College. Good. so, American College of Cardiology and we will see, they have General after. That was kind of throwing me off a bit. We will see, it's got the little stripey shirt there, so we will know that is indeed a journal that is using  the peer review process. So we will know if you find that article, it is considered a peer-reviewed article.

 

A lot of people get thrown off because you see there are one, two, three listings for this American College of Cardiology. People are thinking why are there so many of these? If you look all the way to the right to you are going to see there are different versions of this, online, microform and print. It's because these have different ISSN numbers they actually have to list them separately. They are all really the same journal, they just have multiple listings and you often see that in Ulrich's. So if you do see multiple things there that have that  same name, don't panic. It's print, online, microform, whatever that is. As long as you are seeing the stripy referee shirt, that means refereed or peer-reviewed then you are good to go. Then you know that journal is using the process so your article is going to be peer-reviewed.

 

There are a couple things that you might see in a peer-reviewed journal are not going to be peer-reviewed, but it's going to be things like letter to the editor or maybe an editorial. And those are going to be really brief and you can look at them quite easily know that they're not any kind of research or any kind of analysis of anyone's research. It's just going to be a really brief little thing. And they don't want to sound like a letter to the editor through that whole crazy peer-reviewed process. So those things are not. But everything else that is like a real article published in that journal, as long as it is using the peer review process, is going to be peer-reviewed.

 

Do we have any questions about that? I think that can get a little bit confusing sometimes.

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  I think you did a great job going over that, Trish. I don't see any questions.

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  All right, then. Hopefully everyone was paying attention. Because now, we love quizzes. We're going to test your skills, so here is a citation for an article that was found on Google Scholar. You don't have to go to Google Scholar to look on this. We have all the information here on the slide. But we want you should you use that Verify Peer Review page. So if you don't remember how to get there, if you are on the library website --

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  And I will go ahead and share the link in chat just to make it easier for people.

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  If you are on this homepage you want to click on Start Your Research. Then you will see a Search by Database Box on the Left, Ulrich's:  Verify Peer Review. Emily was sharing, I think, the link to get to this page. What we are going to do as we are going to let you use this information and see if you can tell us, is this peer-reviewed?

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  They know they have another quiz coming up. [LAUGHS] We are full of quizzes tonight.

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  Can you go back here if I click, or is it going to keep going?

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  I think if you right-click you can say previous. [LAUGHS]

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  Thank you.

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  Any time. You picked a long title there, Trish. Although it's good to have a unique title, because some titles that are like Journal of Social Research.

 

>> TRISH PIERSON: And do we have a poll for this one?

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  We do. Let me go ahead and launch it. Hopefully everyone has had a chance to look at it. I will go ahead and launch. You know what, I think I may have to be sharing my screen. So hopefully everyone can see the poll. Is "Research, actionable knowledge and social change:  Reclaiming Responsibility through Research Partnerships" peer-reviewed? Your answer options our yes or no.

 

I know that's a lot to get into Ulrich's, so we will give you a minute to get there. Then I will turn it back to Trish. I will give you another 10 seconds. I feel like I should be singing the Jeopardy song. [LAUGHS] Then I will give it back to Trish and she can demonstrate the correct answer. Although I think, sorry, I am going to give you a little longer because I know it takes a little bit to get into Ulrich's and search. I want everyone to have the chance.

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  Especially if you have not been in there before and you are trying to figure out what's going on.

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  Yeah it's another database, it's another thing to learn. It seems like every database has its little quirks and Ulrich's definitely has its quirks. Okay, I'm going to give you 30 more seconds. [LAUGHS] It always seems so long we are presenting but I know when you're actually searching, it's not that long. I am going to give ... I will wait 10 more seconds for telling you the answer.

 

I'm going to go ahead and close it. I will share the results. Woohoo. 75% of you got it right.

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  Excellent.

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  I will turn it back over so you can see Trish's screen so you can see why.

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  So, yay, you guys probably are just following this sense already looked. If you go we will see the stripey, referee shirt here.

 

So yeah, if you are an Ulrich's, you have typed in the name of the journal and you are looking, we see it right here, we see the stripy shirt, we know we are good to go as far as the articles in there are peer-reviewed. So there we are.

 

Once you're used to it, it really is pretty easy. So if you really are set on, I love Google Scholar, I really, really want to use Google Scholar and I don't care that it can't tell me if things are peer-reviewed or not. What you can do is, some people have Ulrich's open on one tab and they will have Google Scholar open on another tab and they will just be searching and when they find something they think they are interested in, you can just grab that information for the journal and you can throw it in to Ulrich's and search.

 

And before, the way we grabbed this is if you're in Google Scholar doing a search, you will see, with Google Scholar, you can limit things by date over here on the left or you can include patents or citations or things like that. But there's really not a way to tell it hey, I'm going to check this little box and get peer-reviewed stuff. But if you do want to grab the citation and you are looking at this jumbly information here, underneath the title and then the little bit of paragraph stuff, you will see there's a variety of icons and there's a little icon that has a quote mark, so if you click on that with that's going to do is show you a citation. Wow, this is a very large citation. But you will see, it is in a variety of formats like MLA, APA, Chicago, various styles. Here at Walden it's all APA. But as you go out into the world there may be places you are using other citation formats. This gives you some other options there. Than what you would do is you would just grab the name of the journal. That particular thing was a report so I don't know that it had an actual journal name. Anyway, that's where you would be able to grab that information. You just want to pull out the journal name and throw that into Ulrich's to check it.

 

Do we have any more questions about Google Scholar or using Ulrich's or peer-reviewed limiting in the databases or any of the other peer-reviewed stuff we talked about?

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  Not really. We did have one questions about, is Ulrich's a website or part of the library. I responded privately, but maybe it would be good to clarify, Ulrich's is a database we subscribe to.

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  Actually it is not a database. It is a [indiscernible] tool. Picky, picky. We like to be very specific. It is what it says it is all right, such periodical directory. What it is is a big, giant directory of periodicals which is another name for journals. You will see this is a great way to tell if something is peer-reviewed or not but there's a lot of other information about the journal, as well. So if you're not seeing the little, stripey T-shirt, you will Journal of European Higher Education is not peer reviewed. But you could get more information about it the following this little line, it's almost like a spreadsheet across. So you would see that thing is that particular thing is published in Germany, that it is an active Journal, so that means that is actively publishing. Or only seeing one line here, so it is only a print journal, not something that is available online. That's pretty uncommon, but it is something that is out there still.

 

So there's a variety of information you can get there like that generally looked at the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement. Actually if we look at that's status you will see that it ceased printing. So if you like to write or even care, if you are looking for a really current version of that Journal if you see that it ceased printing,  that means you are only going to find stuff that was published up until that point that it stopped. And if you click on the title of that Journal, you actually see more information about that particular Journal. So you can see that it was coming out of the University of Georgia. It ceased publication. The last year it published was 2010. So if you're looking for something from 2018 and he can't find anything and you're like why is this, you can go to Ulrich's and see look, they stopped publishing in 2010. So I'm never going to find anything that's more current than last thing. And there's a bunch of other stuff down here that you can look at if you ever got interested about any of that. So yeah, if you just want to find information about a particular Journal other than the fact that it's peer-reviewed or not, then Ulrich's is a great place to go. But it is something we do subscribe to here in the library so it's not just out there online for free. We pay for it for you, though. So as long you're a student here, you can get access to it and you don't have to worry about the cost.

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  Thanks for clarifying that.

 

Okay, I think, are we ready for our final quiz, do you think?

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  Yes. I think we are.

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  Let me grab control. Here we go. Show my screen ... so, we, as you can tell, we really like polls. We just want to check that some of the major things we've covered click with you guys.

 

So, my first poll question, this is a true or false, everything in Google Scholar is peer-reviewed.  I'm going to go ahead and launch that. You should be able to see the poll. so go ahead, I will give you a few seconds, probably half a minute.  True or false, everything in Google Scholar is peer-reviewed.

 

Apparently you guys was listening because everyone has gotten it right so I'm going to close the poll before someone gets it wrong. [LAUGHS] I'm not sure if that is sound research. But, yes. Well, no. [LAUGHS] Not everything you find in Google Scholar is peer-reviewed. So the answer was a false. You guys did awesome.

 

Let's see if you can do as well on my second one. We are going to go ahead and go for the back and what we covered. My next question for you is, "A literature review is a primary source." Is that true or false? So I talked about literature reviews back at the very start. [LAUGHS] When we talked about primary versus secondary. So, is a literature review a primary source or ...  in literature review is a primary source. True or false. Again, I will give you probably half a minute  to think about that.

 

Since we only have a minute left in our schedule time, I'm going to go ahead and close it off there. Most of you got this right. No, in literature review is not a primary source. A literature review is like, a perfect example of a secondary source, because the authors just read what other people had done, they read my research. They read my fabulous article on doing a webinar and then they wrote about what other people had done. So it is definitely, when the entire article, the entire paper is literature review, it's a secondary source.

 

Okay, then we have one more question and this one, I don't know if we discussed it. But I'm gonna launch it, anyway. True or false I can tell if an article is peer-reviewed by looking at the abstract. So this is back to what Trish has been talking about. If you can tell by looking at the abstract of the article, so the information about the article, whether or not the article is peer-reviewed. This one is going to be a battle. [LAUGHS] This one is really close.

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  We didn't really talk about that one, so this is kind of a ...

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  This is a curveball. Let's go ahead and share it. The majority of you got this right. So if you could tell an article was peer-reviewed by looking at the abstract by actually looking at the article then you wouldn't need Ulrich's. You would need to go in and verified the Journal uses the peer-reviewed process. But because that is at the Journal level, nowhere on the article does it say this is a peer-reviewed article. So that was kind of our curveball for tonight. But thanks for putting up with us.

 

And thank you for your attendance tonight. We hope this has been helpful, that you've learned some stuff, that things are a little clearer. And we do have, let me say,  I'm just going to throw up my advertising again. If you want to come to another webinar on this series, right resource, right time, how to evaluate library materials, it's going to be fun. [LAUGHS] The next one is really helpful in actually figuring out when to use what you find. Now that you kind of know what's out there, peer-reviewed, primary secondary, scholarly. That will go into more detail on when to use it in your academic work. So it's coming up in July.

 

Since I'm sharing my screen, I'm going to go to the library homepage and just show where you can register for webinars and also where you can see the recordings. So if you go to the homepage, you will see this library skills button box. If you click on it up in the middle, it will say webinars. So you can look at upcoming webinars, that's where you can register for the next one. And we will be posting the recording of this on the recorded webinars. You will also be getting an email tomorrow or within the next 24 hours with a link to the recording.

 

And I think we also have a follow-up poll. We just love polls. [LAUGHS] So if you do have feedback you would like to share with us, when you exit the meeting or when I close it out, you will see a link to share feedback, because we are always trying to improve and make these better.

 

Any final words, Trish?

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  I'm not sure if you were actually sharing your screen. Because I can still see the polls.

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  Oh no. I'm sorry. I forgot to hit hide.  Now can you see my screen, Trish?

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  Yes.

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  I'm so sorry. Okay, let me go back. On the library homepage, you will see the library skills button over here on the right. It says tutorials, webinars, guides and more. When you click on that, in the center, you will see the webinars box. So you can register for the upcoming webinars. And we also will be posting the recording here on the recorded webinars. I'm so embarrassed I forgot to switch that.

 

Okay, I think that's all. "The Evaluating Resources Guide ... cell, if you do have questions about what, or you just want to review what we've gone over tonight, we do have a lovely card that has more information. So again, from the library homepage you just click on library skills. Over on the left there's the library skills guides. Then there's this lovely one called evaluating resources. And I know you guys are tired because we've been talking at you for an hour. I'm just going to share that link in the chat. It's also in the PowerPoint if you downloaded it. It's a fabulous guide that has more information about what we've talked about. So you will see over on the left, primary, peer-reviewed, secondary. Then we talk a lot about popular versus scholarly under the [indiscernible] type. Think that's a wrap. Thank you everyone for your attendance tonight. We hope this is helpful. Have a lovely evening.

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  Thanks for coming and for being such good sports with all of our quizzes.

 

>> EMILY ADAMS:  All of our quizzes. [LAUGHS] We had fun with this. Thanks for humoring us. Take care, everyone.

 

>> TRISH PIERSON:  Thanks.

 

 

End Transcript

 

Created June 2018 by Walden University Library