Workshop with Patrick Wiliams, 2.15.16
Some issues to keep in mind as you evaluate sources
- authority
- currency
- validity/accuracy
- audience–jargon is a pretty good indicator of audience—even if you’re not sure what you’re looking at, you can take some cues there
- point of view
Patrick’s recommendations for specific research tools beyond ProQuest:
- SCOPUS (all scholarly, focus on science, tech, medicine, social science, arts, and humanities); provides “who cited this” function
- Social Sciences Full Text (a lot of public welfare, social work, and urban studies, so it might be pertinent to these students’ projects)
- GreenFILE (collection that is focused on sustainability and environmental issues, but draws from variety of disciplines in social sciences and health)
Remember that there are multiple different ways to access databases, depending on whether you know what you’re looking for–you can look at subject-specific lists, search for name of database alphabetically, or browse area-specific research guides including this one for public health: http://Researchguides.library.syr.edu/public-health
Pay attention to the search results as a set–there’s a lot to take note of here:
- different publications where this topic is being discussed (journal titles)–this can be useful in further searching
- references lists for valuable texts, which provide jumping-off points for additional searching
- how many other scholars have cited this piece, which points to significance of a particular publication
From within search result, you can email, print, or cite (without RefWorks here, you can just have it generate a fully formatted citation that you can just copy and paste yourself).
Note that the journal titles are often hyper links—you can click to see full table of contents, which is particularly helpful if this article is appearing in a special edition whose theme and other contents would be valuable to you
Library subscribes to over 500 different databases–you can use SUMMON to effectively search across different databases for something specific (if you have a title or author you’re looking for). Unlike Google Scholar, the library’s website provides you FREE full-text access to all this information–take advantage of it!