In our session today, we brainstormed about some of the best practices for finding the research literature for your assignments.

Here are some of the ones we came up with together:

Strategies for finding the best resources

• Summon – a Google-like interface to the library’s collections online and print  (books, journals, theses, etc.)
  
• Research guides to find the discipline specific resources. e.g. forestry research guide
• Web of Science – has additional features: times cited sort, analyzing your results by author/conference
• Google Scholar – access through the library site to get the full-text via UBC elink
• Use the references from papers, books and textbooks. Also from sources like Wikipedia – trace the reference at the end of Wikipedia articles to primary source. Read the primary source! Don’t rely on the wiki content.

Searching Techniques

• Focus topic with additional terms/concepts – e.g. in our sample topic of global warming and forest, include another idea like finding information on the mountain pine beetle.
• Phrase Searching by using quotations around the two ore more words. e.g.  “global warming”.
• Chunk your question into the component pieces: e.g. idea 1: forests idea 2: global warming
• Boolean operator AND to join concepts together forests AND “global warming”
• Boolean operators OR to join synonyms together “global warming” OR “climate change” OR “greenhouse effect”
• Boolean operator NOT or the – sign. e.g. -South America NOT South America (be careful w/this one, as you can eliminate valuable results from your  search)

Need more help with your research? AskAway or contact Katherine Miller

Posted: 09|23|11 at 3:45 pm. Filed under: Uncategorized.
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