Library and Research Skills Micro-Course

You are not alone if you struggle finding relevant and reliable information sources. Most students experience this at one time or another. The good news is that by practicing a small handful of techniques (including the preceding sections on topics and tools, you can become a search pro! Let's start with this brief video explaining why you probably won't find that one perfect article.

Compile a list of relevant terminology: 

• At this point you also want to refer back to your notes and ideas from your background reading and compile a list of possible topic concepts:
  • What are the most relevant concepts related to your topic (people, places, theories, events, etc.)? What words or phrases did you see that could be used as search terms? 
    • Example (topic: teen video game addiction): teenagers, adolescents, youth, "screen time" "video games" "video gaming" "video game addiction" "internet gaming disorder" "video game culture" "compulsion loops" "compulsive gaming"
  • Refer to a thesaurus if there may be synonyms you can't think of (example: teenagers: adolescents, youth, juveniles).
  • Consult an encyclopedia or search Wikipedia to get a quick history and scope of the concept as well as possible terminology. You don't use these as cited sources, but they are invaluable in getting a handle on terminology.

Combine concepts to create searches:

• Focus on just the words or phrases that most concisely describe the main concepts
  • Example research question: What impact has global warming had on emperor penguin feeding habits?
  • Main concepts: global warming, emperor penguin
  • Relevant Wikipedia article and another
  • Possible related terminology: Aptenodytes forsteri, antarctica, climate change, habitat, Southern Ocean, diet, food availability, ocean temperatures
• and between each concept
  • penguins and antarctica and feeding
  • penguins and diet and ecosystem

• Double quotes around commonly-used exact phrase concepts of 2+ words
  • "global warming" and penguins
  • "aptenodytes forsteri" and "climate change"
  • "emperor penguin" and "food availability" and "ocean temperatures"
• Review more about search strategies with this video tutorial:

Reference mining

• Just like when you write a paper and have to cite the sources you consulted, journal article authors have to do the same thing. Chances are good that those citations point to reliable sources. If you can find one good and relatively recent source on your topic, you can then mine the list of references. Then copy-paste article titles that look relevant from that list into the search box to see if the library has them. This method is the most accurate way to do research and if the one experts (and your professors) often use when conducting research. Here is a video demonstration of reference mining. Also note that in OneSearch, the red arrow icons to the right of each result allow you to do this as well.