Narrowing a Topic
Creating a Research Plan
Find Articles, Ebooks, and More
Find Print Books/DVDs
Popular, Scholarly, and Trade Sources
Reading & Locating Scholarly Articles
Locating Primary Research Articles
Find Current Research in a Field
Nursing Research
Education Research
Evaluating Websites
Creating Citations
InterLibrary Loans
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One of the most important steps in the research process is narrowing your topic and figuring out how to communicate with websites, databases, and search engines to find what you're looking for.
In this tutorial you will learn to:
Research is about more than just finding information. It's about knowing what kind of information you need, when you need it in your research process, and where to locate it. So, we need to make a plan for our research journey.
Create a research plan
Understand the role of various kinds of sources in research
Locate articles on controversial topics
Locate sources in Summon
There is a lot of information out there. Even in Summon a simple search can return millions of results. However if we know the kinds of sources we're looking for, we can use that to narrow down our search and find the kinds of sources we really need for our projects.
Summon is a tool for searching multiple library databases at once to help you locate the articles and information you need for research.
Databases usually are more trustworthy than articles from a regular Google search because articles on databases have been specifically chosen by librarians and experts (researchers and other professionals in their fields).
Scholarly articles will make up most of the sources you use in your assignment. This tutorial walks you through the process of finding them and provides strategies for making them easier to read.
When doing research, especially in the sciences, sometimes your research something is something testable. However, it’s not always possible to conduct an experiment yourself. So, finding empirical studies is a good way to see how other experts have used surveys, observations, and experiments to study a topic.
If you're researching for a behavioral sciences topic such as in psychology, you have even more options in our subject databases to locate empirical studies.
Sometimes you need to explore current research in your field to see what other experts are currently discussion. Other times, you may simply be looking for ideas on a potential topic for your own research. For both these options, finding recent issues of peer-reviewed journals is a great way to get started.
Researching for the field of nursing comes with its own challenges. In this tutorial, we'll learn to to use nursing databases like CINHAL filter our search results, and save citation information.
Create PICO Questions
Refine PICO keywords with medical terminology
Locate sources in CINHAL
Education can be a very interdisciplinary field to research, which makes knowing how to describe our topics especially important. In these tutorials, we'll learn to to use education databases like ERIC and the Professional Development Collection to filter our search results, and save citation information.
Navigate the Education Research Guide
Refine searches with education terminology
Locate sources in ERIC and the Professional Development Collection
Websites should always be the last place you go for research. Always begin with books and articles from the Library databases because they are easier to trust. However, when you do need to use websites in your research, we want to make sure that we're using sites that we can trust. Fortunately we can use the CRAAP test to evaluate websites to find ones that are more trustworthy to use.
Citations give credit to the sources you used in order to create your research. Not only does this help avoid plagiarism, but it also helps your audience check your sources and allows them to trust what you have to say more easily.
There are a lot of different citation styles. Choose the one you need to use from the list below.
Books are a great way to start your research and get background information on a topic. To find a print book, movie, or print magazine about your topic, you’ll want to check the library Catalog.
One of the biggest misconceptions about the library is thinking that the only sources you have access to are the ones on our shelves or in our databases. Our library is a part of a much larger network of libraries working together to share resources so that everyone is more likely to find what they need.
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