Keyword tips

Databases are set up to do keyword searches. What is a keyword? Technically speaking, it's any string of letters that you type into the search box, which the database then attempts to find anywhere in any of its records. The database can't understand English, so it just matches strings of letters. There are specific "operators" you can use to make keyword searching more effective.

Say I want to search for swine flu. If I just type that in, I will get all the results that mention swine one place in the article, and flu some other place in the article. Not all of them will be relevant. The solution for that is to put quotes around phrases so that they are searched as a unit and not separately:

"swine flu"

Another thing is that if I'm looking for articles about swine flu and type that in, I will not get any results that call it H1N1 instead. The solution is to think up as many synonyms for your concept as possible. Join all the synonyms for a concept with OR, and put them inside a pair of parentheses.

("swine flu" OR H1N1)

Say I want to research the correlation between people getting swine flu/H1N1 and having respiratory complications. Those are two separate concepts, each with their own keywords. Put each concept in parentheses like before and then join the two concepts with AND.

("swine flu" OR H1N1) AND ("respiratory complications" OR pneumonia)

Say I did the search above, but was only interested in results in Mexico. I could add a third concept (Mexico OR Mexican OR Mexicans) but there's an easier way. Just put an asterisk (*) in place of the word ending that changes to include all the possibilities.

("swine flu" OR H1N1) AND ("respiratory complications" OR pneumonia) AND (Mexic*)

And finally, say I wanted was interested in results anywhere but Mexico. For that, I would use NOT to exclude articles that contained that keyword.

("swine flu" OR H1N1) AND ("respiratory complications" OR pneumonia) NOT (Mexic*)

____________________
Questions? Ask a Librarian

Primary Sources

When doing research, you have to differentiate between primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. What makes a source primary, secondary, or tertiary is partly the source itself and partly how you use it.

Primary sources are the foundation for research. They're direct evidence of what you're researching. In psychology, a primary source could be a diary or an interview with a subject. In the sciences, they could be the readouts from equipment and spreadsheets of data gathered from observations. Kinds of primary sources include:

• diaries, journals, letters, interviews, memoirs, autobiographies (not ghost-written ones!)
  
• photographs, audio and audio-visual recordings of events
• sketches and written accounts of events by witnesses
  
• equipment readouts, tables of data, logs of observations
• documents and artifacts produced by an event or phenomenon
  

Secondary sources are other people talking/writing about primary sources. For example, scholarly articles and monographs are secondary sources. They analyze, interpret, and formulate opinions. Secondary sources contain someone's original thoughts and interpretations of the primary sources. Kinds of secondary sources include:

• monographs (scholarly non-fiction books)
  
• scholarly articles
• many non-scholarly non-fiction works
• documentaries
  

Tertiary sources are not used in scholarly research. They're used strictly for teaching and learning - textbooks to introduce a person to a subject and reference books to provide background information and answer questions about the subject. The information they contain may be correct, reliable, and even advanced, but what makes them non-scholarly is that they're not original thoughts. Kinds of tertiary resources include:

• textbooks and accompanying materials
• many educational videos
  
• reference books
• many websites
  

It gets a little more complicated in the humanities. In literature, history, and cultural studies especially, things that were originally written as secondary and tertiary sources can become primary sources! For example, a 19th century science textbook for children was originally a tertiary source, but in the hands of a person studying the history of science education, it's direct evidence of past science pedagogy. Or a medieval treatise on theology might have been intended as a secondary source, but a modern Women's Studies scholar might use it as a primary source on medieval beliefs about sex and gender.
____________________
Questions? Ask a Librarian

Medical Research in the Library

Whether you are in the Nursing Program, writing a paper on a health and wellness topic, or curious about something going on in your own life, the Empire State College Library can provide you with sound information on human biology, medicine, and the medical industry, including reference materials, e-books, and scholarly articles.

The first place to start looking is the Health and Biology Subject Guide. You can get to it by clicking this link, or by going to the Library website. Click the Resources By Subject link in the left column, and then click the Health and Biology link in the yellow box.

Like all subject guides, Health and Biology is organized under the blue tabs running across the top. The first tab contains basic introductory and health information. The second covers news and new research - the latest articles from various resources delivered right to that page. Reference tools has links to various medical and health dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference resources. Journals & Articles has links to the databases that will help you find scholarly articles on your health, medicine, medical industry, or human biology topic. Books lets you search the E-Book Catalog for books on your topic, or go directly to a collection of Biology e-books. Statistics & Websites contains links to websites that the librarians and faculty have selected for their scholarly-quality information. And Multimedia has links to audio and audiovideo resources that you may find useful.

Some databases you might want to look at are listed below:

• Medline - This is the premier database of peer reviewed medical research. Go here to find the latest articles that report on the results of scientific studies.
• CINAHL - This is the database to go to for articles in the field of nursing (and allied professional fields.)
• ProQuest Health Management - This database has technical and scholarly articles about the health industry - hospital administration, health insurance and health maintenance organizations, the pharmaceuticals industry, and so forth.
  
• Health & Wellness Resource Center - This is a database of articles intended for a general audience (and some peer reviewed) about various help topics. Information on alternative and complementary therapies is included. This is a good place to start if you have a health concern of your own.
  

____________________
Questions? Ask a Librarian

Election Day resources

Tuesday, November 3 is Election Day. This is an off-year; most elections are for local officials. Mayors, local judges, city council members, members of the schoolboard, and other municipal officials make decisions about taxation and how your tax dollars will be put to work. Local elections may not get much press coverage, but their outcomes definitely affect our lives in important ways.

The League of Women Voters provides a service called SmartVoter.org. It has information like how to find out if you are registered to vote, your polling location, what elections are being held, laws regarding getting time off to vote, and more. You can also search for your state's Board of Elections website.

Politics is a case study in how crucial it is to identify the sources of bias. Here are some other resources for informing yourself about the issues:

• Gale Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center - a library database that contains articles, opinion pieces, and primary sources from all points of view about various "hot topics"
• Congressional Quarterly Electronic Library - a library database containing federal government policy documents and analysis.
  
• FactCheck.org - a website run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center. It doesn't accept funding from corporations, lobbyists, labor unions, or political parties. "We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases."
• PolitiFact - a service of the St. Petersburg Times and The Congressional Quarterly. It features the Truth-O-Meter, which rates the statements of public figures all the way from bald-faced lies to 100% true and verifiable. There's also the Obameter, which tracks the President's progress (and lack thereof) in fulfilling campaign promises, and the Flipometer, which tracks politicians who change their minds and votes about the issues.
  
• FollowTheMoney.org is a non-partisan non-profit organization whose service lets you track campaign contributions and lobbying in state and local politics. And MAPlight.org similarly lets you track donations and lobbying in national politics.
  

So look over these resources today, and get out and vote tomorrow!
____________________
Questions? Ask a Librarian

Urban Legends: A Case Study in Critical Thinking

Halloween is this Saturday, and it seems that this time of year is especially rife with urban legends - stories that most people have heard and many people "know" are true, but aren't. Here are some Halloween urban legends (and one or two that are actually true.)

Urban legends are passed as anecdotes among friends and e-mail chain letters. Sometimes they show up on websites and TV. Once they're widely accepted, they can appear in reputable books, the evening news, and classrooms (like the "we only use 10% of our brains" myth.)

We believe them for 3 main reasons:
1. we read/hear them so often
2. they're passed on by people we trust - a cousin, an author, a TV anchor, somebody who says they work for Microsoft
3. they fit in with our pre-existing hopes and insecurities about the world

Snopes (http://www.snopes.com) is a fantastic site to check out any sensational "news" you read or hear of a computer virus, get rich quick scheme, conspiracy theory, or "scare." Here's what they say about themselves:

We don't expect anyone to accept us as the ultimate authority on any topic. Unlike the plethora of anonymous individuals who create and send the unsigned, unsourced e-mail messages that are forwarded all over the Internet, we show our work. The research materials we've used in the preparation of any particular page are listed in the bibliography displayed at the bottom of that page so that readers who wish to verify the validity of our information may check those sources for themselves.

You can trust them - provisionally - because they show the sources of their information so you can go back and decide for yourself.

The TV show MythBusters has a fan site full of articles and interactive features here: http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/mythbusters.html.
MythBusters is entertaining but it's also educational - it demonstrates how to apply basic scientific method to determine whether or not to believe something that's commonly "known." In other words, form a hypothesis and design an experiment to prove or disprove it. In real life, this is often as easy as looking it up in a reliable reference book to see what others have already discovered.

• Dictionary & Encyclopedia Search
  

____________________
Questions? Ask a Librarian

Chaining: A research technique

When you're searching in a Library database, whether it's JSTOR, Academic Search Complete, or Science Direct, sometimes you'll find only one or two articles that are exactly what you're looking for. But you need more than that. Chaining is a technique that helps you find "more of the same."

Chaining means you go into the footnotes and bibliography of the article that's right on topic, and note down what sources the author cited. The idea is that the author is only going to cite sources that provided information relevant to their article topic, so those sources are probably relevant to your topic too.

Then go back to the database and search for those articles. Remember to search for the article title (not the journal title) and to enclose the whole title in quotation marks.
____________________
Questions? Ask a Librarian

Sign up for an @Home Library Workshop

The next @Home Library Workshop, Introduction to Searching, will take place next Tuesday, October 20, from 6:00 to 7:30 pm. Please go here to sign up.

Participate in an @Home Library Workshop from your own computer. You don't have to install any software but you do need a highspeed Internet connection, speakers, and a microphone hooked up to your computer.

@Home Library Workshops are 90 minute live, interactive sessions with a librarian and your fellow students. Introduction to Searching covers how to:

• Create a search strategy from a research topic
• Use the Resources by Subject guide
• Search Journal & Newspaper Articles
• Use powerful search results page options
• Search E-Books

If you are new to library research, or would like a refresher, please sign up to join us this coming Tuesday!
____________________
Questions? Ask a Librarian

Columbus Day

"In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." It was a significant accomplishment. With the technology available to Renaissance Europeans, crossing any wide stretch of water was incredibly risky.

It's funny though, that we say Columbus "discovered" the Americas when there were already tens of millions of people living there. That's not to diminish the accomplishment. We should acknowledge and even celebrate the flourishing of discovery and innovation that took place in Europe at that time, and the immense courage and talent it took to explore the unknown.

But while we commemorate the achievement of a great European explorer and his crew, we have to break our silence about the achievements of the civilizations and cultures that had already existed on the American continents for thousands of years. Not to mention the history of war, exploitation, resettlement, disenfranchisement, forced assimilation, and discrimination.

Sometimes people get angry if they hear anything good about the bad guy, or anything bad about the good guy. But if history is motivated by a contemporary agenda, whether a conservative or a radical one, it's compromised. History is simply about learning from the past. It's up to us to apply the lessons in the light of reason and human decency.

• After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America
  
• Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America
  
• The Columbian Voyages, the Columbian Exchange, and their Historians
  
• Columbus, Shakespeare, and the Interpretation of the New World
  
• Conquest By Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of their Lands
• Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity
• Encyclopedia of North American Indians
• Encyclopedia of Western Colonialism Since 1450
• Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire from Columbus to Magellan

________________
Questions? Ask a Librarian

Finding GOOD information on the web

You may do most of your research on websites, or you may have the opinion that the Internet can't be trusted as a source of information. The truth is between the two extremes. There is a lot of valuable information on the Web, some of which can't be found anywhere else. But that valuable information is the proverbial needle in a haystack. What you need is a magnet!

There are a number of sites that can be considered powerful magnets for finding that needle. They have people who find the best resources in every topic and then list, categorize, and describe them for you.

• Open Directory Project - the largest human-reviewed directory on the web. Its human reviewers are volunteers, so not all of them are information professionals or subject experts.
  
• Librarians' Internet Index - the human reviewers are information professionals but not subject experts. Selection criteria are stricter, and the site is smaller.
  
• Internet Scout Project - information professionals and content specialists work together to select sites that are included here. This site is the smallest and has the strictest selection criteria.
  

The next time you need web resources on your topic, don't just dig through the whole mess with a search engine. First look in these places, to see if someone else has already done all the digging!

Bear in mind that the people who selected the resources on these sites may have standards for reliability and usefulness that differ from your own. Always use critical thinking to evaluate resources and the information they contain. More on that can be found here: Evaluating Websites
____________________
Questions? Ask a Librarian

What makes scholarly sources scholarly?

Often, you will be asked to use scholarly sources for your papers and projects. Many of the Library's databases consist entirely of scholarly articles, for instance, JSTOR, ScienceDirect, PsycArticles, SocIndex, and Medline. Nearly all the other databases have an option on the search screen to limit your search to all scholarly (all peer reviewed) results.

But what is it about a book or an article that makes it scholarly?

"Scholarly research" boils down to a system for verifying facts and logic. It's a set of checks and balances to prevent errors, nonsense, and lies, from being passed off as good information. A scholarly researcher first learns the ideas and findings of others in the field. The researcher then develops a hypothesis and designs and implements a methodology to prove or disprove that hypothesis.

Scholarly also means "by scholars and intended to be read by other scholars." Popular sources have articles that are intended to be interesting and comprehensible for as many people as possible. They have to leave out some details and simplify others. Scholarly sources have more detailed, advanced, sophisticated information. And it's closer to the source, not translated for you by another non-expert.

In the peer review process, an article being considered for publication is inspected by two or more other subject area experts. They question whether the author did enough background research, used a solid methodology, collected data properly, and interpreted statistics accurately. They look for logic flaws, signs of bias or agenda, outdated or discredited information, and more. The article may be rejected; if it is accepted, the author must fix all the problems before it can be published. Scholarly books (also called monographs) are not peer reviewed, but subject expert editors perform the same function.

____________________
Questions? Ask a Librarian