During today's class we will cover the following:
Goal: By the end of this session you will understand some of the ways the Library supports your learning, how to search for research sources, and where to get help.
Scholarly Journal Articles
Strengths: often based on research findings or extensive review, written by experts, reviewed by experts, provides evidence
Weaknesses: Sometimes written using discipline-specific language or terminology, hard to understand,
Books and Book Chapters
Strengths: Provides an in-depth investigation into a topic
Weaknesses: too long, sometimes hard to tell whether it is scholarly
Encyclopedias
Strengths: short, contains background information on a topic, normally a great starting point when you are just learning about a topic
Weaknesses: too short, print encyclopedias are out of date quickly, Wikipedia has reliability issues
Media Sources (news, online magazine articles)
Strengths: Good for current information
Weaknesses: Sometimes biased, sometimes written to entertain, often not written by experts
Websites & Social Media
Strengths: Highly accessible, includes government info
Weaknesses: It is hard to assess credibility and reliability...anyone can post online or create a website
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Scholarly (peer-reviewed, academic) |
Non-scholarly (popular) |
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Author(s) |
Subject matter expert; often with advanced education (e.g., PhD) or working at a university |
Journalists, professional, or creative writers; may be crowd generated content |
|
Verification |
Reviewed by an editorial board or other subject matter experts (peers) |
Reviewed by an editor (sometimes) |
|
Audience & language |
Researchers, scholars, students; language is academic or technical |
General public; uses everyday, easy to understand language |
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Content |
Reports original research; builds on previous knowledge |
News, and practical information, creative works |
|
Cites sources? |
Always cites other research |
Occasionally, but not required |
How do you know if you have a credible, reliable, relevant source? Consider the following:
Your resource doesn't necessarily have to meet all of these criteria.
The following video has more information about ways to understand and evaluate the credibility of sources.
There are all kinds of information resources available. When you find a source, two key questions you should always ask yourself:
Many of your instructors will ask you to use academic sources in your assignments. This usually means peer-reviewed journal articles, scholarly books/chapters, or other credible resources that rely on dedicated research.
Non-scholarly sources are great for when you need background or supplementary information to give some context, such when discussing current events, or understanding how your topic is discussed in the real world, outside of academia/research settings.
The MRU LibrarySearch tool - the main search box on the library homepage - is like Google for library resources. Use it to find information in all formats (articles, books, magazines, videos, etc.) through a single search.
And just like Google, your keywords tell LibrarySearch what your are looking for. Using specific keywords that describe your exact topic in detail, and in context, will help the search understand what you need.
Example: assume your are studying metacognition, and you need to do some research on self-reflection.
| Example search | # of results | Effectiveness |
|---|---|---|
| self-reflection | ~118,000 | A single keyword search is often too general, and may return thousands of results unrelated to your topic. |
| self-reflection learning strategy | ~53,500 | Using 1-2 keywords that connect your main topic with a related topic will help improve your search. |
| self-reflection learning strategy "undergraduate students" | ~4,900 | Using multiple keywords that connect your main topic, related topics, and some context for your research will get you better, more relevant results. |
Other LibrarySearch Tips:
Phrase searching: Use "quotation marks" around key ideas made up of multiple words.
Truncation: Use an asterisk * to find different endings to your keywords
Synonyms: Using different keywords to describe the same idea will retrieve results that use any of those terms. Note that synonyms are most effective in brackets with the word OR between them.
You can combine all of these search tips in a single search:
These advanced Google search options will help you find useful, credible information on the open web.
Use site: to look for resources from specific web domains.
Use allintitle: to find websites where all your search terms appear in the title of the webpage.
Use allintext: to find websites where all of your search terms must appear in the text of the webpage.
Please take a few minutes to complete the online Student Evaluation of Instruction for this class.
