Research Workshop Notes

Research Workshop

Topics:
The research process
The free web
Vetting Websites
Google University
Using Subscription Databases
Giving credit where credit is due
Netiquette

The Research Process:

Can I state my search problem in a clear question?
What type of information do I need? (brief overview, scholarly, news, point of view)
How much information do I need? (research paper, essay, definition)

Does the search tool of database cover my subject?
Does it contain the formats I need to answer my questions? (newspapers, magazines, primary sources, encyclopedia)
Are their abstracts to help me decide if the text will be useful?
Can I understand the information contained in it?

What are my major concepts?
What synonyms, broader or narrower terms, or related ideas could I use?
How can I use Boolean operators?
Will proper nouns focus my search?
Have I spelled everything correctly?



Are my hits relevant, readable, accessible?
Have I tried different combinations of Keywords?
Did I spell my search terms correctly?
Do I need to talk to a library information specialist for advice?
Should I try another database or search engine?
Is my topic even “doable”? Should I consider another?

Problems with the "freeweb" (google, etc.)
Most copyrighted resources are not available on the internet.
There is no editorial board
No filters for the quality of the info.
You could be using the work of a six grade class!
Bad Examples


Vetting Websites
Questions to ask....

Is the page associated with an institution, company, university, government agency or other organization?
Have you ever heard of the organization?
Is it well respected?
Does the author’s affiliation with the organization appear to bias the information?
Who is the intended audience for this information?

Who is the author?
What are his/her credentials?
Are they qualified to write on this topic?
Are they the creator of the information? If not, what are the sources?
Do you believe the information is reliable? Verifiable?
Can you defend this source to your teacher?

When was the information on this page created?
When was it last updated?
Are your information needs time sensitive?

Google:
It is the biggest web search engine database with over 25 billion pages
Results often include what you want
Plenty of user friendly features, shortcuts and speical databases

How Does it Work?
Spider programs find pages on the public web, build huge databases of web pages.
Search programs gives you ways to search this database.
Results are organized according to PageRank


PageRank
organizes your results according to:
Word Proximity and Placement
Popularity: a link to a page is a vote for it
Importance: traffic, popularity of pages linking to a page.

Boolean Operators

Use the AND operator to search for all words.


OR
OR is used to capture synonyms or related words in order to widen search
Car or automobile


NOT
NOT eliminates possibilities that you suspect will cause problems.



Truncation
Some search tools allow you to use an asterisk (*) or a question mark (?) to stand for any character or string of characters.

Teen*

Phrases
You often will want words to appear together in a specific order. Commonly, quotation marks (“”) set words as phrases to be searched as a whole. (*Some search engines use parenthesis, commas or hyphens instead of quotation marks).


Field Searching
This strategy restricts searches to certain portions of Web Documents. It allows you to specify that the search words appear, for instance, in the title, URL, or in the domain

.COM Commercial site. These sites will vary in their credibility.
.GOV Government site
.ORG organization site, often a non profit.
.EDU School or University (Determine whether the school source is k-12 or university and if the page were written by a student or a professor)
.MIL Military
.NET Networked service provider

Number Ranges
Red Army
Red Army 1941..1945


Case sensitivity

Baker (retrieves name and elimantes most references to cake and bread makers)
China (eliminates reference to dishes)

Google Tip: Use Specialized Googles for more targeted results


What is Google Scholar? 
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.

Features of Google Scholar
Search diverse sources from one convenient place
Find papers, abstracts and citations
Locate the complete paper through your library or on the web
Learn about key papers in any area of research

How are articles ranked?
Google Scholar aims to sort articles the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each article, the author, the publication in which the article appears, and how often the piece has been cited in other scholarly literature. The most relevant results will always appear on the first page.

ProQuest
For most research projects the free web is not enough! Most copyrighted resources are not available on the free web.
Paid services like Proquest provide full text online access to reference materials, journal articles, and government publications.