This lecture provides a guide on effectively using academic databases for research, emphasizing the importance of peer-reviewed sources and strategic search techniques to find relevant scholarly articles.
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welcome everyone this is our library lecture
lecture
um these
these
skills that i'm going to
show you today are transferable to other
places like
universities where you do research but
they're also applicable to public
libraries as well
so even if you don't go on to university
many careers you might go into you want
to be able to be up to date on the
latest information about
now most of you have used google before
and google is very valid for its purposes
purposes
but for academic research you'll
generally want to use academic databases
now i'm not a librarian so my caveat
today is i'm not a librarian but we do
have a library at city college with many
online resources
so if you run into anything or you're
having trouble finding something
or the databases aren't working right
you're going to want to ask the library
for help so they have an email address citylib.sdccd.edu
they also have this handy 247 chat with
a librarian and you can get to that from
um this is a
you can chat with a research librarian and
and um
um
it won't necessarily be a research
librarian at city college it might be at
another college
that the person that you connected with
might be from another college
but um it's there and available 24 7 and
most of the stuff is pretty standard
so if you're having trouble finding something
something
a research librarian can help you
there and there's also more in-depth
information about research using
databases here at library.sdcity.edu
research so
you can check that out if you're curious
first things first if you haven't
already you're going to want to read the
written assignment instructions so that
you at least know why we're doing this
but also so you can try search terms for
a topic that you might actually choose
for your written assignment
the written assignment instructions are
now today we're going to focus on what
are called peer-reviewed sources so the
articles you're going to search for are
going to be peer-reviewed so in the
written assignment instructions
i included a little blurb
about what peer-reviewed means and so
basically when
researchers and scientists conduct a
study and they write up an article
kind of describing what they found
they'll submit it to a journal right for publication
publication
and then that article gets put through a
peer-reviewed process so basically
if a journal is a peer-reviewed journal
what it does is it sends that article
out to
other experts in the field right
right
those experts
review your article look at your
research they critique it
they send it back
to you
you respond to all the critiques you
make edits to your article
basically it's a and then it's a process
where you kind of go back and forth a
little bit with these experts in the field
field and
and
if these experts in the end approve of
your research and they think you did a
and that your research is valuable
they'll approve it for publication in
the journal right
right
and so the goal here is to make sure
that these articles contain quality research
research
and that the authors are not making wild
claims based on poorly collected and
analyzed data okay
okay
so when you're searching these databases
there's going to be a little option that
you can
check a box that says that you only want
search results from scholarly peer
reviewed journals and i'll show you that
okay
so things to know in general when using
databases you want to
know about word choice um
um
so what search terms you're actually
going to use
how to combine different words and also
what fields to type words in so what do
we mean by word choice
so let's say your topic
you want to write about the relationship
between sleep and learning right
right so
so
what do you think are the most important
probably you're going to come up with
sleep and learning okay that's great
relationship although a very important
word um
in the topic it probably isn't a word
you'll want to use so
so
just because not all articles will use
the word relationships
there could be articles about sleep and learning
learning
that say how sleep helps learning right
so they might use the word help
or how getting enough sleep
helps the cognitive process or something
like that
and you're missing articles because
you're using the word relationship um
you really just want the really
meaty words like sleep and learning
now let's think of some alternative
terms these can be broader terms or
narrower terms
or synonyms for sleeper learning
so can you think of any
i can think of a few
memory for learning cognition
behavior
behavior for learning it's a very very
broad term but might as well throw it
rem could be used for sleep maybe you're
only interested in the rem stage of sleep
sleep
you could search non-rem or slow wave sleep
right these are just some possibilities
so we've come up with some search terms
and now we want to talk about how to
combine terms so i'm going to use a venn
diagram to illustrate this
so if we're searching a database that
has articles about sleep
and we search that same database
for articles about learning
and if we combine these two words sleep
and learning with an and
we'll only get this stuff here in the middle
middle right
right
so and
narrows things down right
right
so if we say
let's say we want to search sleep and
learning and we want to throw in a third
search term like something like school
right so that's not a term we would use
for our topic necessarily but just to
illustrate this
we have this so now we have three things
we're combining
if we combine these three things with
the word and we'll only get this much right
right um
um so
so
this word and
when it combines terms it will narrow
our results so we'll get fewer results
the more words
most databases will default to the word and
and
even if we don't specify but that's not
always the case not all of them do this
a lot of them they have
they have little automatic algorithms
underneath everything that will take
over if you don't tell them what to do
our goal here is we want to take control
of the databases and manipulate them
effectively to get what we need out of them
so now let's talk about the word or
so if you put sleep and learning and
then you combine them with the word or
you get everything right
right
you get everything about sleep
everything about learning and everything
about both
you're gonna get things about
about
you know everything about how to get a
child to sleep if they're sick all kinds
of sleep topics that have nothing to do
with learning
over here you're going to get things
about learning
um so learning how to read in the third
grade things that have nothing to do
with sleep
so really what we're interested in is
this middle part
so we're going to use and we're going to
okay
and so when trying different search terms
terms
it's nice to list them out like this
because what you can do is you can combine
combine
anything that means sleep with anything
that means learning right so we could do
sleep and learning
we could do sleep and memory sleep in cognition
cognition
we could do learning and
you could also do ram and memory right
right
so there's a bunch of different search possibilities
