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