PICKING THE RIGHT SEARCH TOOL(S) FOR YOUR TOPIC

Before you begin your search for information, you need to think about the best place to look. There are several questions you need to ask in order to pick the best search tool for your topic:

1. What are the primary subject areas you are researching? There will usually be more than one. For example, if you are writing a paper on alternative health treatments for ADHD for an education course, you will need to look in the education literature, the health literature (which will include medicine, nursing, and alternative health databases), and the psychology literature. Search tools in all of these fields will provide different perspectives on this topic.
2. Are you working on an assignment that requires you to look for specific formats and/or types of information? Some search tools will find books, but not articles; others will only find articles. Some search tools only index scholarly literature, and some only index popular literature. If there are items you are required to find, or items you are not allowed to use, be sure the tools you choose include those types of items.
3. How lengthy is the required paper? How many sources do you need? For a one-page paper requiring only one source, a single database might be adequate. If it is a 20-page in-depth analysis of a particular issue, you will probably need to look in more places to find more sources.

There are several categories of search tools. For the purposes of this class, we will discuss the following: library catalog, article databases, library discovery search (OneSearch), all of which can be found at https://library.weber.edu/, and Web search engines.

LIBRARY CATALOG

The library catalog lists items owned by a particular library and its branches. The Stewart Library catalog will locate items owned by the main campus library in Ogden and the library located on WSU’s Davis campus. Most libraries have a link to their library catalog from their home page, and anyone with an Internet connection can search the catalog; no login is required.

A link to the Stewart Library catalog can be found on the Stewart Library home page by clicking on the yellow icon that looks like a book, or by clicking the Search link at the top. The library catalog includes records for items physically housed in the library, including books, CDs, maps, and videos. It shows where they are located in the library and tells you if an item is available or checked out.

There are two things you will NOT find in the Stewart Library catalog. The first is electronic resources, such as electronic books and streaming music. These may be found using OneSearch. The second is articles. The Stewart Library catalog will list the titles of the magazines, newspapers, and journals found in the library, but will not provide information on the articles in them. For example, the catalog will tell you that we have copies of the New York Times and Vogue, but it will not provide you information on the articles in these periodicals. You can find articles on specific topics using article databases or OneSearch.

CALL NUMBERS & LIBRARY CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS

When you look for information in the Stewart Library catalog, you will notice that each item has a call number. Call numbers show you exactly where the item is located in the library.

There are several different classification systems used by libraries, and the call numbers for each look a little different. The easiest way to tell what type of call number you have is to see whether it starts with a letter or number. If it begins with a letter, it’s probably Library of Congress (LC). The LC classification system is used in most academic libraries in the United States. If it starts with a number, it’s most likely a Dewey Decimal system call number. Dewey is used primarily in public and school libraries. There’s another classification system called Superintendent of Documents (SuDocs) which is used for government documents. These call numbers are distinctive in that they often have colons (:) and slashes (/), where LC and Dewey do not.

We use all three systems in the Stewart Library.

HOW TO READ DEWEY & LC CALL NUMBERS

All numbers in LC are read alpha-numerically. L comes before LA, which comes before LB. LA 1 comes before LA 120, which comes before LA 1000, and so on.

Dewey numbers begin with a number, for example 370.152 STU. The first number (370) is read as a whole number. Treat the rest as a decimal, e.g. 370.152 would come between 370.15 and 370.16. Then work alphabetically to find the letter (S). Sometimes there are numbers after the letter. If this is the case, read these numbers as decimals.

Dewey Call Numbers

Library of Congress (LC) Call Numbers

WHAT THE CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM MEANS

Call numbers correspond to subjects. If you find a book beginning with the LC call number R, it has something to do with medicine. If you look at call numbers starting with RT, it’s the field of nursing. If it has a call number beginning with RK, the book deals with dentistry. Books that begin with RK60 deal with preventative dentistry, and books beginning with RK520 deal with orthodontics. This can be very useful information. For example, if you are doing a paper on operative dentistry and you find the book Sturdevant’s Art and Science of Operative Dentistry in the online catalog with the call number RK501.A78 2006, you can look right next it on the shelf at the other RK 501 call numbers to find the Atlas of Operative Dentistry: Preclinical and Clinical Procedures and the book Fundamentals of Operative Dentistry: A Contemporary Approach. In other words, if you can find one great book on your topic, all you have to do is look at the books next to it on the shelf with similar call numbers, and you’ll be able to locate other relevant titles. Remember that books about the history of dentistry could be in another section, such as history, depending on whether the primary subject is considered to be dentistry or history; one example is Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris: DC729 .J66 2014.

SUDOCS

There is one more call number system that is used in the Stewart Library, and that is the Superintendent of Documents numbering system created for materials that are published by the U.S. Government. The basis of this system is to group together government publications by author, which is the department or agency that issued the publication. For example, information produced by the Department of Agriculture is found in the A’s, and information produced by the Health and Human Services Department may be found in the HE’s.

In the example below, the agency that published this source is the Department of Commerce (C). The subagency is the Census (3), and the series is 186. The report/series number (P-23/) indicates a unique publication within the series, and may consist of numbers or letters and numbers with punctuation. The individual report number (190) differentiates this report from the others in the report series. Punctuation includes colons, periods, slashes and dashes, all of which separate segments of the call number.

LIBRARY DATABASES

There are different types of library databases. Some are general or multidisciplinary databases, meaning they cover a wide range of subjects; an example is Academic Search Ultimate. Databases such as Art Full Text, Criminal Justice Abstracts, Education Full Text, and MEDLINE are subject-specific databases. If you aren’t sure where to look, Academic Search Ultimate is a great place to start. However, it’s best if you can find a database that focuses on your topic area. To access the databases, click the blue icon that looks like a stack of discs or CDs on the Stewart Library homepage, you can click the link for Academic Search Ultimate, or select a subject from the drop-down menu for a list of subject-specific databases, or click a letter if you know the name of the database you want to use.

Stewart Library subscribes to over 250 databases on a wide variety of topics. Many times, it is a good idea to use both general and subject-specific databases. For example, if you are doing a paper on alternative health treatments for diabetes, it would be a good idea to use a general database (Academic Search Ultimate) plus a variety of health-related databases, such as Alt-Health Watch (includes both popular and scholarly articles on alternative health care topics), MEDLINE (includes scholarly articles from all fields of medicine), CINAHL: Nursing and Allied Health (includes popular and scholarly articles in nursing, allied health, biomedical and consumer health literature), and Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition (includes scholarly full text articles in the health professions).

Databases include many different types of information. Some only include articles from periodicals (magazines, newspapers, and journals). Some include entries from reference books, such as encyclopedia articles or dictionary entries. Some include collections of images, pamphlets or brochures, legal proceedings, chemical structure, case studies, or specific reports, such as U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings or papers presented at conferences. Some databases include a variety of different sources. It is important to look at the type of information covered in a particular database before you search. At WSU, brief descriptions of the databases are found in the lists of article databases on the Stewart Library website. For example, if you look at the three database descriptions below, you’ll see that the Middle Search Plus database includes the full text of general, health, and science magazines. This would not be a good database for someone who needed scholarly articles.

The IEEE Xplore database includes journals, magazines, conference proceedings, and standards in the fields of engineering, computer science and other related disciplines.

The ARTstor database is a huge database of images; again, if one needed articles on art topics, this would not be the best place to look.

GENERAL/MULTIDISCIPLINARY DATABASES

Helpful videos are located on the Library Science (LIBS) Textbooks and Resources webpage in the “Videos – How to Use Library Resources” section. These videos provide a quick overview of how to use a few of our general/multidisciplinary databases and services. A few of these videos are linked below.

• CQ Researcher and Global Issues in Context are great databases for pro/con or argumentative papers on a variety of current issues.
• Academic Search Ultimate is our biggest multi-disciplinary database, covering nearly every area of academic study. This database includes popular magazines, trade publications, and scholarly publications.
• The Stewart Library provides full text access to over 150,000 eBooks covering a broad range of subject areas and topics. Learn about searching for eBooks.
• The Stewart Library subscribes to over 250 databases. Learn about Selecting a Database.
• Interlibrary Loan is an excellent resource for requesting any materials located outside of the Stewart Library Collections.

COMMON CITATION MISTAKES WHEN USING DATABASES

When it comes to citing sources, some find it a little confusing to parse database records and find specific pieces of information, such as database names, journal titles, publishers, and other items commonly found in database records. To help clarify some of these common mistakes, please review Dissecting Database Records in the Citing Sources chapter.

ONESEARCH

OneSearch is a discovery tool — sort of like a “library Google search.” It provides a single gateway to the Stewart Library’s extensive collection of print and electronic resources, including books and e-books, articles, streaming music, videos, dissertations and theses, conference proceedings, government documents, and digitized sources from WSU Archives and Special Collections. It also searches most of the journal, magazine, and newspaper resources available through the article databases. Other types of materials such as library research guides are also included. If you wanted to find everything in one place, OneSearch would be the best place to look. The main drawback to OneSearch is that you will typically get a lot more than you need, which can be overwhelming; you must be able to do very specific searches and limit your results.

To use OneSearch, click on the green magnifying glass link from the Stewart Library’s homepage. OneSearch is best for lower level research like English 2010, Botany 1303, or History 1700, or for research where an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approach is needed.

Anyone can access and search the OneSearch interface and search Stewart Library resources; however, only Weber State University-affiliated patrons will have access to licensed resources (such as articles and other resources found in the library’s article databases). These resources require you to log in using your WSU username and password.

While it does contain information from most of the library’s databases, there is some information that is not included in OneSearch. If you are doing more advanced work, figure out the best databases in your field and use them directly. Individual databases will always allow you to focus your search better than OneSearch. However, if you’d like to use OneSearch for advanced research, you can use some advanced search features.

WEB SEARCH ENGINES

There are numerous general Web search engines, such as Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo. Probably the most well-known engine is Google, in part because it is more sophisticated than many of the others. Not all search engines work like Google, and different search engines will find different information. This is partly because they rank sites in different ways.

GOOGLE

Google allows you to limit your search in many ways, for example, by domain (.edu, .gov, .org). One way to limit your search is to use the Advanced Search screen, which at the time this screenshot was taken, was available in the settings menu located in the lower right hand corner of the Google search screen. (Google is famous for making small changes to their interface, so it may have moved.) You can also access Advanced Search through Settings under the search bar on the results page after conducting an initial search, which is useful if your browser gives you a Google search option without actually taking you to the Google search page, such as Chrome does. Once you are in the Advanced Search screen, you can limit by language, file type, and usage rights, to name a few (see following images).

To do a more effective search using Google’s basic search box, use these tips:

• Whenever you have a phrase, like “gun control,” “stem cell research,” or “global warming,” ALWAYS use quotation marks. This will reduce the number of results you retrieve significantly and will also increase the relevancy of your results.
• Unlike article databases, the order of search terms affects the order of search results in Google. Be sure to put the most important terms first.
• For more relevant results, use more terms. For example, if you are interested in how sleep deprivation affects college students’ grades, don’t just type “sleep deprivation” in the box. Type in “sleep deprivation” “college students” “academic achievement” grades.

The following pages show the results using different terms.

This search on sleep deprivation retrieved over 58 million hits. Unfortunately, the top search results did not provide information on sleep deprivation in college specifically.

This search retrieved fewer results, but still over 3 million hits.

Putting “sleep deprivation” in quotation marks and adding the word college helped lower the number of results and made the results more relevant. All of the results have something to do with sleep deprivation in college, but only some address grades or academic achievement.

This search retrieved only 26,400 results.

Using quotation marks around all of the phrases and adding a few more relevant terms greatly decreased the number of results and a few of these sites focus on grades, sleep deprivation, and college students.

INTERPRETING YOUR RESULTS

After you do a Google search, how do you know what you are actually finding? Is it a book? An article? A website or webpage? A blog? A report? What can you guess about the sources from looking at the results? You can save time by doing some initial evaluation of your search results BEFORE you click on them.

Here is a Google search results screen for a search on test anxiety in college students, and an initial examination of this page. These search results include a mix of scholarly articles, commercial websites, education websites, and organization websites. One link takes you directly to a PDF source.

Note: Google and the Google logo are trademarks of Google LLC.

Many Google Scholar searches retrieve online scholarly journal articles. Below is an example of what a journal article might look like online. Online articles will typically have a volume number, issue number, and journal title. Many will also include an abstract/summary of the article’s content. (More on searching Google Scholar is covered in the next section.)

The following example is a non-scholarly website article post found in a Google search. This article is hosted on a .org website for California Community Colleges, California Virtual Campus Online Network of Educators. In reading through this article, you will see in-text links to surveys and other sources. Online articles may or may not include a formal Works Cited or Reference list.

The source below (a website homepage) is typical of something you might find in a Google search. This website provides Online Student Readiness Tutorials from the California Community Colleges Online Education Initiative. This website homepage links to a number of online resources that are available for students.

Within the California Community Colleges Online Education Initiative Online Student Readiness Tutorials website are webpages focusing on various students success topics. The example below features the webpage for Personal Support.

GOOGLE SCHOLAR

The Google Scholar search engine provides an easy way to search for scholarly literature on the Internet. While Google retrieves any website (both good and poor quality), Google Scholar weeds out general websites, linking you to some of the scholarly sources you would see in article databases like Biological Abstracts, JSTOR, or Academic Search Ultimate. Google Scholar includes a variety of scholarly materials in addition to articles, such as preprints, theses, books, technical reports, etc. These materials come from a variety of different sources, including academic publishers, professional societies, and universities. Even if you find something through Google Scholar as opposed to Google, it is always a good idea to evaluate any source you find before you use it.

Q. Is the material on Google Scholar the same as the material in the library’s databases? (In other words, is it better to use one over the other?)

A. Not always. If you want to do a more comprehensive search, use library databases in addition to Google Scholar. While there is some overlap between the two, there are some important differences. This table illustrates these differences.

SEARCHING GOOGLE SCHOLAR

Sometimes, when searching Google Scholar, you will find interesting article citations or abstracts (summaries). In many cases you may have access to the full text of these articles through the Stewart Library. By setting “Library Links” to specify the items that might be in the Stewart Library, Google Scholar will show you which items are full text. When articles are NOT available in full text via Google Scholar, they can be obtained through interlibrary loan instead of paying a publisher.

To link to Stewart Library resources, locate the three lines at the top left hand side of the Google Scholar website. When you click on those three lines, a menu will appear. Click on “Settings.”

On the Settings screen, click on “Library Links.” Type “Weber State University” in the search box. Check all of the options that appear in your search. Click “Save.”

Video tutorial on how to link Google Scholar to Stewart Library resources.

Note: Google and the Google logo are trademarks of Google LLC.

As with any Google search, it is a good idea to examine the results screen and make some initial judgements about what you find. Google Scholar tends to find more scholarly articles than anything, but you may also see websites, webpages, or books, and not all of them will be available in full-text directly from the results screen.

WIKIPEDIA

There are many different kinds of wikis. Some are general, and some focus on very narrow subjects. Wikipedia is probably the most well-known wiki. It includes a collection of articles on every subject imaginable and is written and edited by volunteers. Your instructors may have told you that it’s a horrible place to get information. This is not completely true. If you’re careful and evaluate content, Wikipedia can be a useful place to look for topics, get useful background and keywords to use in library search tools, and find references and sources, especially Web sources. Similar to other encyclopedias, you can use Wikipedia for basic research, facts and figures, and background information. You’ll need to pay closer attention to the quality of the article than in a regular encyclopedia. In a regular encyclopedia, editors check the articles; in Wikipedia, you have to do the work of evaluating the article. (While Wikipedia does have editors, it is much more difficult for them to keep up with everything.) Keep in mind that, while it can be useful for background information, many instructors will not allow you to use Wikipedia as one of your sources.

Signs of a quality Wikipedia article:

• It agrees with other information you’ve found from accurate and authoritative sources.
• It was a featured article (these are checked by Wikipedia editors and are indicated by a small star in the upper right corner).
  

  

• It has a good list of references and external links. There should be a variety of sources on the reference list. With the exception of very specialized subjects, the use of just one or two sources means the author didn’t do their homework.
• Check out the discussion by clicking on the Talk tab. There are often clues to the quality of the article in the discussion about it. Sometimes you’ll see ratings, other times a lot of argument. If you see a lot of posters that disagree, be very careful about using the page.
  

  

• If there’s a banner across the top or within the article, this is a clue you may need to avoid using the article. Banners usually say something like: “the neutrality of this article is disputed” (Wikipedia articles are supposed to be neutral, not support one side or another). A banner might also point out the article is lacking references or citations or doesn’t meet Wikipedia’s quality standards.

Wikipedia has a helpful “Cite this page” feature.

On the Cite page, scroll down until you see APA or MLA. Please keep in mind that these citations may not be entirely correct. Consult the official APA or MLA manual for specific instructions on how to cite online sources. Citation information is provided for the article in case you want to write your own citation or use a different citation style.

USING THE WEB VS. USING LIBRARY SEARCH TOOLS

Choosing the right tool for the job is not always easy, and as this chapter previously mentioned, the tool you use depends on the topic and the types and amounts of the information needed. In general, it is a good idea to use library tools in conjunction with the Web. Most people like Google because it is easier and more convenient to search — Google does not require ANDs and ORs and special symbols — one can type in an entire question as you would ask it to another person. A simple search will often retrieve millions of results. That’s where library tools are superior. While they sometimes require you to formulate search statements and choose keywords and use special symbols, library tools usually concentrate on specific formats of information or subject areas. It is typically easier to focus a search in a database, and one can choose databases that index specific types of information.

Beware of the common misconception that library search tools only include “scholarly stuff.” While some do, most include a good mixture of both scholarly and popular information. For this reason, it is important to examine a source and make an educated judgement about the quality of that source regardless of where you find it. Evaluating information quality is covered in the next chapter.