Choosing a tool to use to start your research can be confusing.
There are so many to choose from
So how do you decide what tool to start with?
Q1: What types of material do I want?
Q2: Do I need Peer Reviewed/Scholarly material?
Q3: Do I need program specific material?
Q4: Will my professor let me use web sites?
Q5: Is there one place I can look for all of this?
A1: Books, Magazines, or Journals or a little bit of each.
A2: Yes, so I need to be able to access peer reviewed journals. No, magazines and newspapers work just as well.
A3: My topic is general, so a general database or search will work. My topic is specific to education, forestry, or nursing so using a subject specific resource would help.
A4: Yes, but limited to legitimate research related material. No, I need to stick with the library databases or at least Google Scholar (from the library site) that will point back to the library databases.
A5: Yes, I can use LibrarySearch, the library's discovery service that allows me to find most of what I need such as journals, magazines, newspaper articles, books, peer-reviewed articles, videos, and more.
| Q/A1 | Almost everything |
Use The library's online discovery service for books, journal, magazine, or newspaper articles, videos, and more. |
| Q/A1 |
Subject Specific
|
Use specific databases to look for articles from magazines and/or journals in your topic
|
| Q/A2 | Peer reviewed material |
Many journals are peer-reviewed. Many databases that have both magazines and peer-reviewed journals will also have a "peer-reviewed" option. There are some databases that have only peer-reviewed journals such as:
or even
If you are not sure and there is no "peer-reviewed" option, ask library staff. |
| Q/A3 | Program specific and general databases |
Academic Search Complete - general Education Full-Text - specific PscyINFO - specific
|
| Q/A4 | Web Sites |
If you are allowed to use websites, and that depends on your professor, make sure they are legitimate sites and have credible information. In general, .GOV, .EDU, or .ORG sites work, but you still need to evaluate them. There are some .com sites that work too. You can learn how to evaluate sites to determine their legitimacy by going to https://www.umfk.edu/library/resources/evaluating/ |
To see the actual answer, scroll down to the bottom...
Yes
