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What's on this page 2. Find Encyclopedias & Dictionaries 7. Researching & Writing an Academic Paper
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From off campus you need to enter your library barcode number to get access to these databases. In the world of periodicals, there are both magazines and journals. Magazines are popular, written for broad audiences. Journals are peer-reviewed -- articles are submitted to journal editors who send them to academic peers in the discipline who review them. Journal articles are written for academic audiences. Here's a sample search for articles in Academic Search Premier for articles that discuss health behavior and beliefs.
Note how the search is limited to Full Text and Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals. If you use too many limits, you'll get zero results. But, play around to see how you can search more precisely. Once you get a list of results, click on the article title to get to the full article.
Once you bring up the whole article, note that you can click to print, email, and save the article. Also: you can click to cite it!! How cool is that?? When you click to email an article, you can also get an APA formatted citation by clicking for it:
___________________________________________________________________________ MEDLINE is another major medical database for you to use. Like Academic Search Premier, it is available via EBSCOhost. Medline is also available free online from the National Library of Medicine (NLM). We'll use it there. Medline is the world's largest database for medical science. The articles you retrieve may be quite technical in nature. Most will not be available full text. But, you can limit your search to just the full text, as shown below. The search interface there is different, and the results list offers opportunities to get additional articles on the same topic in different ways.
Here's a sample search -- note that the box next to Links to free full text has been checked.
If you find information about an article that is not available full text in the database you are using, ask at the Reference Desk for an interlibrary loan -- we'll find a library that has it and will get a photocopy for you. Sometimes this process that can take a week to ten days, so it's good to plan ahead.
____________________________________________________________________________ Electronic books The library offers an extraordinary collection of electronic books, currently numbering about 18,000. The amazing thing is that you can search words used inside of all those thousands of books. This is a great approach to getting very specific information about narrow topics. The easiest way to get access to them:
We all use Google as our primary search engine. It's the biggest, the most innovative, and the best. Really. Google searches several of its databases simultaneously. Here is a search on Google. Note that it's a Web search. Recently, Google started grouping your search results. Click on Show options.
Google is digitizing millions of books. Book scanner. Every single page in every book is being digitized, but not every page of every book is available -- yet. There's a publishers' lawsuit that restricts access to recently published titles. But information wants to be free, I think, and it will eventually work out. Even at this stage, there are vast amounts of full text available that it is useful to explore. To go to Google books directly, it's books.google.com. You'll note they are also digitizing magazines.
The Web is an open publishing environment. Anyone can publish, and sometimes it seems as though everyone does! It is very important to evaluate what you find. In searching the Web, you want to use resources that are not only recent and relevant to your topic, but that are also based on reliable, quality information resources. A savvy Web user on medical topics will know about and use these sources:
Let's do a little investigation ourselves about magnet therapy.
NOTE: I found the two journal articles using Scholar, Google's periodicals database.
There are lots of places to get images on the Web. Here are two of the better collections: There are lots of places to get access to videos on the Web. The biggest, with the best quality videos is Blinkx.com.
You can use Google Books to look up chapters in books about researching and writing papers. Here are some suggestions:
Also available in the Cabrillo Library's electronic book collection is The Research Project: How to Write It -- Routledge Study Guides; 5th Ed. by Berry, Ralph. London Taylor & Francis Routledge, 2004. To get to the NetLibrary ebooks:
Getting to this page on the Internet
M. Ramsey and T.N. Smalley || last rev. 9/09 |
