What does RESEARCH say about that? A Tutorial

Many of the same topics that interest "average Americans" show up in real research articles. You have been given an article from a popular or commentary/opinion magazine, one which is generally read by "average Americans." Before begining this tutorial, read the article very carefully and thoughtfully. In this tutorial you are going to use some article databases to find an article in a scholarly journal that is EITHER on the same general topic as your popular article OR that deals with one more specific issue raised within that popular magazine article.

Important Preliminaries:

For this tutorial, you will need to have the article that you were given in class, a piece of paper and a pencil. It will be to your distinct advantage if you have read your article and perhaps highlighted some parts that you found particularly interesting.

You will be working with two windows open. This one, with the tutorial instructions and forms and one with the databases you will be searching, so first, you will need to open up a new browser window to access Orradre Library's home page. Click the "Orradre Library" image below to open up a new browser window:

Orradre Library

To make things easier, you may want to move or resize these two browser windows so that you can see both the library homepage and this tutorial on the screen at the same time. You will be recording your answers to a variety of questions right here on the computer. At the end, your answers will be sent to your instructor and a librarian. You will receive a confirmation that your answers were sent. Print or save this confirmation.

What is your name?

What is your email address?

What is the title of YOUR commentary/opinion magazine article?

First Step: Those keywords are KEY

The first step is figuring out what words to use to describe what your popular magazine article is about! Read that article very carefully. In some cases, there are several different possible areas of related research. The scholarly article may not match every aspect of the popular article. Let's look at a very simplified example. Read the excerpts from a short article in the box below.

Dems--Why Not Woo the Young? (Comment). (Democratic Party should address issues of concern to youth)(Editorial) Thomas Geoghegan.

Since 1968 the Democrats have been shut out, more or less, as majority party. But with a small bump in left-of-center turnout, they'd be running the country. The dropoff in voting has been greatest among the young....

A very young person I know (he's 33), said to me, "You look at the '60s, the young people who were leaders then. National leaders. Changing history. Like Stokely Carmichael--he was, when you read about him, only, like, 24! Now I look around, at people even my age, and what are they doing? Nothing. Nothing at all!"

Now it's true, back in the 1960s, we dropped out too. But the way we dropped out is diddly squat to the way kids drop out now. Here's a comparison:

Turnout percentage, of all 21- to 24-year-olds:

1968 51
2000 35

What's shocking is that in 1968 kids were trying to sit out the election. Humphrey, Nixon--both were for the war. Since 1968, the numbers in college have shot up. But newspaper reading has dropped. (So are they more educated?) And voting is now--even in Bush-Gore, a cliffhanger--about a third.

In 1968 half the kids voted: Now that's the rate nationwide. In 2000, it was 35 percent of kids. So won't it, one day, also be 35 percent nationwide?

the article continues...

For the whole article, click here: http://0-search.epnet.com.sculib.scu.edu:80/direct.asp?an=10208618&db=afh

As we did with the "Environmental Justice" article in class, you need to highlight specific passages in the article that suggest areas for further investigation. In the example above, I might quote this line:

The dropoff in voting has been greatest among the young....

Quote the passage in your article you want to use for this tutorial in the text box below.

As we did in class, you need to turn that passage into a research question. In my example here, this might be a good research question:

Why don't young people today vote?

Fill in your research question in the text box below.

The next step is to break this topic down into different MAIN IDEAS and different keywords expressing those ideas. Stick to things that are very concrete and as unambiguous as possible, words that don't require a context for their meaning. These are almost always nouns. In this example, I think there are TWO main ideas, young people and voting. In addition, there are different keywords that could be used to represent each of those ideas. In the case of voting, there are really quite a few different ways of expressing that core idea. Putting that into a chart:

1st idea

young people

youth

2nd idea

voting

vote

elections

politics

Although you may have more than two ideas, it is always important to KEEP IT SIMPLE. You probably do not want to start out searching with more than two.

Fill in your ideas in the text boxes below. Most often you only have two. But, if you have a third, feel free to add that as well.

First Idea:

Second Idea:

(Optional) Third Idea:

Step Two: Speaking Boolean

After you have made a good list of keywords, you need to write them for the computer, as Boolean search statements. In such statements the word AND is used to combine ideas and the word OR to separate alternative words/phrases that express those ideas. In the databases you saw in class, each of the 3 search lines represented one idea, and the lines were connected by AND. Different ways of expressing each idea were connected with ORs. In this search, we have TWO ideas. It is generally a good idea to start with your two most important ideas even if you have three. Then, only add the third if you get way too much that is irrelevant.

So, if we put the ideas and keywords in this example in this search grid, they would look like this:

	young people or youth
and	voting or vote or election
and

This is still a very crude search. You would need to make some refinements:

1. One refinement is using truncation. Most commonly, this is a character, like an asterisk, that is used at the end of a root word to pick up all variations of that word. Here we would want to use it for vote* and and for elect*, so we would get votes or voted as well as vote and elect and well as election and so on. The asterisk is not used universally, but it is very common. It works in Oscar and the databases you will be using here. Very handy for this assignment.

2. There is one more important detail to consider. That is the use of PHRASES. We have one phrase in that search statement, young people. In these databases, you must put quotation marks around phrases or very odd things will happen! So, I would have to edit my search like this:

"young people" or youth

and voting or vote* or elect*

and

Write what you would put on the first line of your search in the box below:

Write what you would put on the second line of your search in the box below:

Write what you would put on the (optional) third line of your search in the box below:

Step Three: Taking it to the Databases

Now you are ready to go into the article databases. For this tutorial, you have several different databases to choose from: Social Sciences Fulltext, Humanities Fulltext, Education Fulltext, Readers Guide Fulltext or General Science Fulltext. As we discussed in class, you may end up searching more than one, but, for this tutorial, you must choose one to start with.

Which one do you want to start with? Type it in the box below.

Now, you have to select this database from the library's list of databases. In the browser window you have open to the library's homepage, click on the A-Z under Databases A-Z in the left blue column on the library homepage, and navigate your way to your database and click to open it. Be patient! It may take a minute. Eventually, you will see the main search screen, which looks like this:

Notice the beige band above the search boxes. It tells you which database you are searching. The one I selected for the example here is Social Sciences Fulltext. You can switch to any of the others by clicking the hotlink Open Database Selection Area and checking the boxes next to them.

Notice the three search lines:

You are ready now to type your different OR statements on each line. My example would then look like this:

Enter your search statements now and click the button.

Scan the first page of results. If you find that your search results look very odd, as in NOT RELEVANT TO THE TOPIC, then change to

If you are still not getting relevant results, then you need to look for other words to use. Look carefully at what you DID get to get ideas for other words. Or get help from a librarian!

As you scroll through your results list, click on the titles of those that look good and read the abstracts. Everything that shows up here is not necessarily a scholarly journal article. Some of the articles will have a little , indicating a peer-reviewed or scholarly journal. But, even within those, not all articles are research articles. You can still get some opinion pieces, and those will not work well in this assignment.

Once you have found a good candidate, look at these little icons: They are telling you whether or not the complete FULLTEXT of the article is available right there in the database or not. The first two blue and red ones indicate that it IS available, in your choice of format. The blue, , indicates that the fulltext is available as an html document, like a webpage. The red, , is the fulltext as a pdf file, which requires Adobe Acrobat to open. The advantage of the pdf file is that the article will look like an article in a print journal, with page numbers..

The green one, , opens another browser window and automatically searches Oscar to see if we own the journal in print. If we do, you should copy down the call number and go over to the library and get it in the Periodicals Room on the 2nd floor.

The last icon, , will do a search for the journal in our list of both print and electronic journals and in the library catalog. Depending on what we have you could see any of these options:

Go to the article in

followed by a link to your article! This is the best possible outcome.

Go to the journal in

followed by a link to a database that includes issues of that journal in fulltext. At this point, you will probably need to browse the available issues, by date or volume, until you come to the one you need.

Go to the database to search for the article

followed by a link to a database that includes articles from that journal. You will then need to figure out how to search for your article. Usually, you want to enter keywords from the title of the article, separated by AND. Always look at what DATES are being searched!

Print Holdings

with a link to the OSCAR record for that journal. You will need to scroll through, line by line, until you come to the line with the volume and year of the journal you need. Then click on the button on the same line.

Finally, if that journal isn't available here at all, online or in print, you will be presented with this option:

Request the article through

and a link to our interlibrary loan service. You will need to copy information about the article onto a an online form. The article will be sent as a pdf attachment to your groupwise email. It can take a couple of days or, rarely, a week or longer to get articles this way.

Step Four: Reporting on Your Selected Article

Once you have decided on an article, you need to complete the form boxes below about that article.

What is the title of the journal the article is in? (Look in the line labeled SOURCE)

What is the title of the article?

What is the date of the article?

What the volume and issue numbers? (Look in the line labeled SOURCE. You probably will have a volume, but you might not have an issue.)

What are the page numbers?

Copy and paste the abstract from the database in the blank below.

Congratulations! You are done as soon as you click on the button below.