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What's here 4. What's available via Google 7. Researching & writing an academic paper
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Getting started
Electronic books The library offers you 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 book. This is a great approach to getting very specific information about narrow topics. The easiest way to get access to them:
The primary periodical databases available for health and medicine are grouped together:
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) and written for academic audiences. Here is a search for stretching exercises in Academic Search Premier:
The asterisk ( * ) after the word exercise means that both exercise and exercises will be searched. The quotation marks are used to keep the words next to each other. The Full Text is checked. Here's the beginning of the results list for that search:
Notice that if I wanted to, I could limit to academic journals -- to get results that look like this:
Once you have a full text document, you can click to email it to yourself. 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. Google has a database for (mostly) periodical articles -- it's called Scholar. The URL to get there directly is scholar.google.com, or you can switch over to it by clicking on More once you're in Google. By now there is enough good and often full text material in Scholar that it is worth a look. Here's a sample search:
Using the Advanced search mode, you can limit by years, as was done here.
Google is digitizing millions of books from major libraries. 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 for books still under copyright. 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. Or you can switch over from a Google Web search.
Would you believe it? Bill Gates and Microsoft want to digitize books too!! Go to books.live.com. It's a snazier system, I think. There are not as many books there as are at Google's book database, but millions is lots to me. And more are being added all the time.
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, believable information resources. A savvy Web user on medical topics will know about and use these sources:
There are lots
of places to get images on the Web. Two of the better collections are Corbis and GettyImages
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
A. Saxton and T. N. Smalley 5/08 |
