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SLWK 1114 - Fall 2025 Library Session

🧑🏻‍🏫️Doing Academic Research with LibrarySearch 

LibrarySearch is MRU Library's one-stop search interface that provides access to our collection of books, journals, videos and more.

We have about 1.3 million e-resources and over 220,000 physical resources in our collection, and Library Search searches across those.

Things to remember when using LibrarySearch:

  1. Sign in to your account to save searches, mark items for later access, and to request materials.

  2. Use the pin icon to save books and articles to your Favorites for future reference.

  3. Use the filters on the right. You will use Availability, Resource Type, and Date filters most often. Filter settings can be "locked in" so that you don't have to reapply them each time that you change your keyword search.

  4. Some items may not be available, however, you can request unavailable items using what is called interlibrary loan.

  5. When viewing an item record, scroll down to the Access Options section to get access to the full text of an item.

How to Search in LibrarySearch

GOOD TO KNOW! Do NOT enter sentences or questions into the search box! Enter keywords only. Try to break down your topic or question into key concepts and use only those concepts as keywords.

You can use what are called search operators to search in a way to combine different terms by telling the search engine exactly what you want and this can help you save some time (and frustration!)

  • Use quotation marks to keep specific phrases together:

    • "social work"

  • Use AND to combine search terms (LibrarySearch automatically creates an AND when you write terms one after another, but it can be good practice to use an AND to help you understand the searches that you build) (AND narrows your search):

    • "differently abled" AND inclusion

  • Use OR to connect two or more similar terms when either one is relevant (OR broadens your search):

    • youth OR adolescents

  • Use wild cards to substitute a letter or suffix with a symbol:

    • An asterisk (*) after the root of a word will find different variations of that word

    • access* (in this example, access* will retrieve records that contain the words accessibility, accessible, accesses, etc.)

🧑🏽‍💻️Doing Research with Google Scholar

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is another great way to find high quality resources.

Besides providing links to resources in MRU databases, Google Scholar links to online repositories that contain articles the author has been allowed to upload, including  Academia.edu, ResearchGate and other institutions' collections.

Helpful Search Operators to Use in Google Scholar

Google Scholar's Advanced Search is found by clicking the menu icon in the top left.

You can also add search operators to Google Scholar searches to build your own custom advanced searches in similar ways to LibrarySearch:

  • Use quotation marks to keep specific phrases together:

    • "social work"

  • Avoid using AND to combine search terms with Google Scholar, as the search engine automatically creates ANDs between concepts and sometimes adding an additional AND can confuse the search syntax.

  • Use OR to connect two or more similar terms:

    • "climate change" OR "global warming"

  • Use intitle: to limit your search to search terms only appearing in the title of a resource:

    • intitle:"social work" intervention

⚖️Evaluating Information

RADAR stands for

Relevance

Authority

Date

Accuracy

Reason for Creation

We can ask the following questions to help us assess each criterion:

Relevance:

  • Does this source fit my topic?

  • What is this source's intended audience?

    • Is that intended audience appropriate for my use case in this assignment?

Authority:

  • Is/are the creator(s) of this source clearly identified or known to us?

  • How important is it in this use case to trust the source's creator(s)?

    • If it is important, why should we trust the source's creator(s)?

    • Is the source's creator credentialed or an expert in their field?

Date:

  • Is the creation or publication date of this source identified or known to us?

  • Is this source too old? Might the information be outdated, or no longer accurate?

Accuracy:

  • Do this source's facts "check out"? Does this content align with what you're seeing in other sources?

  • Does the source have references of its own? Does the creators of this source cite evidence to support their arguments?

Reason for Creation (take your best guess at this question using judgments from earlier criteria):

  • Why was this source made? To sell a product or service, to inform/educate, to entertain, etc?

 

📖Scholarly Sources

A scholarly publication is a book or journal article written by experts in a particular field. The primary audience of these articles is other experts, and sometimes students.

Journal articles specifically are also referred to as "peer-reviewed" or "refereed." These mean essentially the same thing and refer to the editorial and publication process in which scholars in the same field review the research and findings before the article is published. 

 

Some Helpful Questions for Identifying and Evaluating Scholarly Sources

  1. What are the author’s credentials and affiliations? Is the author an expert on the topic?

  2. Was it published in an academic journal? Can you tell if the journal has a peer review process?

  3. Does it use academic or technical language (and would an average person understand it?)

  4. Does it includes a reference list of sources that it is citing?

  5. How long is it? (Scholarly articles are typically longer than magazine or news articles.)

🤷🏾Why Do We Cite?

 

1. To pay respect to other thinkers’ ideas and give credit where credit is due. (It also protects us from charges of plagiarism!)

2. To support our own ideas and claims with evidence.

3. To establish our own credibility and authority as a thinker, writer, speaker, professional, etc. It shows the effort you put into your research.

4. To allow interested readers to identify and retrieve the sources that we have used in order to explore them more themselves.

 

🆘 Citation Help

  • Use the "cite" tool found in most databases to get you started (you will need to review and correct the citation).

  • Cite Sources: Learn the correct way to cite sources by using the guides on the Cite Sources page on the Library website.

  • Academic Success Workshops: APA: An Introduction and APA 2: An Online Escape Room. Academic Success Workshops are 75 minutes long and are offered both in-person and online. Registration is required.

  • Appointments: Personalized online or in-person 30-minute appointments with a Learning Strategist at Student Learning Services located on the 2nd floor of the Riddell Library & Learning Centre.

  • Use the Service Desk on the 1st floor of the RLLC for assistance as well as the library chat feature on the library website for quick citation questions.

Librarian

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Sara Sharun
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