Library Research

1. Library Research Databases and Search Strategies The following information was taken from the Brookens Library (UIS) website. Additional information can be found in their handouts and FAQ’s at http://library.uis.edu.

2. Beginning your Research There is not one correct way to go about doing research for a paper. Research is in a lot of ways an art, not a science. Do not feel bad if you feel overwhelmed with information. This is a normal part of the research process. No one ever said that doing research was easy, but it can be a lot of fun.

3. Search Strategies • Pick a topic that interests you. You’ll have a much more enjoyable time researching. • Read some overviews of your topic, either encyclopedia entries or books of a general nature. This way you will learn about various facets of your topic, in order to narrow the topic down to something manageable. A common approach is to just start researching the broad topic, and in the process of synthesizing the material, you will determine what facet you want to focus on. • If you find that your topic is too narrow and there just isn’t enough information about it, try the same approach as step 2 and read some overviews on a more general version of your topic. • Look at the references in the books or articles you read, to see what sources the author used to write the book/article. Sometimes the references are annotated, or have a brief summary of the source. • Critically evaluate your sources. What are the author’s credentials? Is the author biased? This is especially important when reading websites, since there usually isn't an editor to critique what is written. But you should get in the habit of evaluating all your sources.

4. Primary vs. Secondary Sources • There are two kinds of sources for information, primary and secondary. • Primary sources are firsthand, "direct from the source" information. • Secondary sources are analyses of primary sources. If you write an autobiography, that's a primary source for your life. If someone reviews or writes a criticism of that autobiography, then that's a secondary source for your life. Or if someone writes a biography of you, that would also be a secondary source.  • For literature, the works by an author are primary, and the criticism of the works are secondary.  • For historical issues, letters, diaries, and contemporary accounts are primary sources, while anything written after the event is a secondary source. 

5. Scholarly vs. Non-Scholarly • One could also divide information into two camps, scholarly and non-scholarly. Sometimes your instructors will place limits on the types of sources you may use for your research, stating that you can only use scholarly information. Periodicals can be clearly divided this way, usually referred to as journals vs. magazines. • To judge whether a book is scholarly or not, it's best to note who the author is and what his/her credentials are, and whether there is a bibliography and notes to sources consulted. To a certain extent you can judge this also by the publisher. As a rule, university presses almost always publish scholarly works, while other presses may or may not.

6. When to Look for a Particular Format • If you want a one or more page summary or background information, try an encyclopedia. • If you are looking for a more comprehensive analysis of your topic, look for books. • If you are looking for more detailed analysis on some aspect of your topic, look for articles. • If you are looking for an objective accounts of an event, look for newspaper articles.  • If you are looking for more obscure or esoteric information, pop culture topics, or historic primary documents, look for websites.

7. Off-Campus Access to Databases • You can access the library's book catalog ILLINET Online, and virtually all of the UIS library's databases from any computer connected to the Internet. However, access to the databases is restricted to current students, faculty and staff. • You will need your Network ID (NetID) and password. (This is the same as your UIS e-mail account login and password.) When you click on the link to the database, a login window will pop up.

8. General/ Interdisciplinary Databases • Databases such as Academic Search Premier, Expanded Academic ASAP, PerAbs PeriodicalAbstracts, and Wilson SelectPlus all offer access to a broad range of both magazine and journal articles. Advantages: • All of the databases offer some to all of the articles indexed in their entirety, a.k.a. in full text. Whether a particular article is available full text has no bearing on it's quality. Some publishers sell the rights to the articles to virtually all databases, some sell only to a particular database, and some won't sell the rights at all. • You can pick up articles from a wide variety of disciplines in the general databases, which may offer very different perspectives to the same topic, depending on what your topic is. • The core news magazines and scholarly journals are almost always present in the general databases, though they may just be indexed and not presented in full text format.

9. General/ Interdisciplinary Databases Disadvantages: • There usually aren't very many limiters you can utilize. The producers of the general database aren't going to analyze the article to the depth of telling you if it is a review article, a research article, etc. • The citations are limited to periodicals. Relevant chapters from books won't be included. • Subject headings vary in quality and consistency, and they don't offer much depth for a particular discipline. • The number of periodicals indexed is rather shallow if compared to a subject-specific database.

10. Subject-Specific Databases On the opposite end of the spectrum there are subject-specific databases.  Advantages: • Tailored to a particular discipline: business (ABI-INFORM); criminal justice (Criminal Justice Abstracts); economics (EconLit); education (ERIC); environmental sciences (LexisNexis Environmental); literature (MLA International Bibliography); medicine (MEDLINE); philosophy (Philosopher's Index); political science (Worldwide Political Science Abstracts); psychology (PsycINFO); social work (Social Services Abstracts); sociology (Sociological Abstracts); U.S. history (America: History & Life); world history (Historical Abstracts); etc. • Usually attempts to be comprehensive, indexing as many relevant journals and other sources as possible for that discipline. • Indexing itself usually attempts to offer depth: sophisticated subject headings, descriptions of what kind of article it is (review, research, clinical trial, etc.), who the audience is for the article. And therefore the database interfaces offer lots of different ways of limiting your search. • Usually doesn't just index journal articles, but includes other useful sources like dissertations, books and the chapters within books, and sometimes papers presented at conferences. • Includes historical coverage, since usually goes back to the mid 1960s.

11. Subject-Specific Databases Disadvantages: • Though there are exceptions, there usually are no full text articles available. All you get is a citation and most of the time a summary of the source. • Can easily be overwhelmed by the number of results if you type in general words. You will need to be fairly specific in what you are looking for. • The comprehensiveness of the database will pull up citations from some obscure journals and other resources that may prove difficult to actually get your hands on, not to mention materials in other languages.

12. Citation Databases There's another series of databases that cover broad categories as well: Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index, and Social Sciences Citation Index. All of them are produced by the ISI or Institute for Scientific Information and available in the database called Web of Science. These citation indexes are much more comprehensive than the Wilson ones in terms of the number of journals indexed. However, the articles are not analyzed and given subject headings and abstracted by the index producers. Instead the index analyzes the citations within the article, so one can figure out who is citing whom in their research.

13. Citation Databases Advantages: • Very large collection of scholarly journals included in the indexing. • Only source that analyzes the citations. Can sort the results list by number of times cited, so the articles that were the most popular rise to the top. • Does do some analysis of the type of article (book review, editorial, news item, etc.). One can't tell what type of research article it is, but one can at least eliminate those things that aren't research articles. • Can view the citations themselves in brief format. If there's a record for the particular citation, it will be hyperlinked. • Wonderful source for finding scholarly book reviews.

14. Citation Databases Disadvantages: • No full text articles. • Online version only goes back to 1987. We have Arts & Humanities Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index back to the 1970s, but we don't have Science Citation Index in print. (Note: Print version extremely difficult to use; not intuitive at all.) • Many times there is no abstract or descriptors for the article. The indexers have not created consistent subject headings. All you get is the title of the article, author(s), and where it's published. Which means that your keywords will have to be in the title of the article in order for a relevant record to appear. This works fine for the sciences, since the article titles tend to be self-explanatory and have all the unique words in them. Doesn't work so well for the humanities. • Strength of the citation indexes is really in the sciences. Humanities is kind of more of an afterthought to the producers, since citation analysis apparently isn't as important to scholars in the humanities.

15. What Kind of Database Should You Use? What kind of database you want to use depends on what kind of research you want to do. • I just need a few recent articles on my topic. Try a general/interdisciplinary database that has some full text articles. • I want to do a comprehensive search for articles on my topic. Try one or more subject-specific database. You should be able to research back to the 1960s and hundreds to thousands of sources are included. • I want to find the key articles on my topic. Try one of the citation indexes and sort the result list by "times cited." (This option is at the top right of the search results screen in Web of Science.)

16. Search Strategy for Databases • Unless you want to browse subject headings, you will want to use Boolean logic for phrasing your searches. When looking for articles, you will want to be fairly specific. Articles tend to be on narrow topics, and there are usually summaries of the articles in the citations, or even the entire article. If you look for a general topic, you will probably be overwhelmed with results. • Boil down your issue into keywords, either simple phrases or keywords combined with the connectors AND or OR. (Note: the connectors do not have to be capitalized. I'm just doing that for emphasis.) You can be much more specific here than when looking for books. Stick to the nouns and ignore verbs and adjectives, or stick to concrete terms and try to ignore the abstract ones. (For instance, there are too many words to describe the abstract concept of good.) Also, think of synonyms for your keywords.

17. Example of A Search Query • Let's say I am interested in researching the animal rights movement, and more specifically the moral or ethical issues of using of animals in laboratory testing. Using Boolean logic and truncation, I would type: (moral* OR ethic*) AND (animal rights OR animal welfare) AND (lab OR labs OR laborator*) AND test* to find the either moral, morals, morality, ethic, ethics, or ethical, and the phrase animal rights or animal welfare, along with lab, labs, laboratory or laboratories, and test, tests, or testing. • In Expanded Academic ASAP, I would get 8 results with the above search query. I should have used the phrase animal experimentation, because there are 212 articles given the subject heading animal experimentation - moral and ethical aspects.

18. Too Many Results? • Try searching by subject heading. In most databases the subject headings are hyperlinked, so you can just click on the word(s). (Though you may actually get more results by this method.) • Add more search terms. Try to think about what other aspects of the subject you want the articles to reflect.  • Keyword search within a field. You can usually narrow your search by using the Subject, Title, or Source fields within the record. If the word appears in the subject field, it's more likely to really be about that, rather than being mentioned in the abstract or summary of the article. Also, note any limiters available on a particular database: date range, language, publication types (journal article, peer-reviewed, dissertation, etc.). The subject-specific databases tend to offer a lot more limiters than the general/interdisciplinary databases.

19. Too Few Results? • Try looking for more versions of your keyword, like plurals or variations of the word. To look for variations of a stem of a word in most databases, type the stem followed by an asterisk (*). In a few databases, it's a ! or a + or a ? or a $. Consult the online help for the particular database for truncation, stemming or wildcards. • Try to think of other words to describe your topic. What words could someone use to describe your issue?

20. Library Subscriptions To find out if the UIS library subscribes to a certain journal go to the Journals @ UIS to see if your periodical is • available full text, or • owned in print or microfilm by us -- note the call number! • Type in the name of the journal, magazine or newspaper and click the GO button. • The Journals @ UIS will list those databases that offer full text access of the particular journal, noted by a date range. • The UIS periodical holdings are included as well. It will say "Print/microforms holdings " and give you the date range and the call number. You may also use the yellow UIS Periodical Holdings spiral-bound books scattered around the library, or the book catalog ILLINET Online.

21. Evaluate your Sources Questions to consider about your sources: • Audience Who is the intended audience of the information? The general public, a more educated or attuned segment of the general public, or specialists in the field? • Authority Who wrote the information? Why did they write it? What are their credentials? How many other things have they written? Who published/sponsored it? What's the criteria for them publishing/sponsoring a work?  • Bias Is the information presented objectively? Are the opinions balanced, or does the author have an agenda? • Credibility Does the information seem credible? Does the author give sources or suggestions for further reading for the information? How comprehensive is the source list? What type of sources did the author use? If some of the other sources are websites, do the links work? • Factual If facts or statistics are presented, are they accurate?  • Up to Date Is the information current?