Transcript psy207a - Mercer County Community College

PSY207 - Tools & Resources
for Finding Useful Info
Martin Crabtree – MCCC Library
November 18, 2004
Agenda
• Finding books
– The College’s Card Catalog
– Periodicals, scholarly vs. popular
• Electronic Searching
– Keywords & Boolean Searching
• Electronic Databases at Mercer
– Databases available through Mercer Library
– Accessing the databases
• Web Information
– Searching
– The Invisible Web
– Evaluating what you find
• Giving credit where credit is due
• Your turn to do some searching
Using The Card Catalog
•
The catalog is available
online. Used to find books,
videos and other material
both in the MCCC collection
and the Mercer County Public
(MCL) libraries.
•
You can have materials from
MCL brought to the college.
Deliveries arrive Tuesday and
Friday afternoons. (DVD’s not
available from MCL)
•
You will need to have your
student ID card to borrow
books or use the library’s
computer lab
The link to the catalog is on the
library’s web pages.
Periodicals
• Periodicals include:
– scholarly journals
– newspapers
– Magazines
• Periodicals represent the bulk of
published scholarly information.
• The library has a number of periodicals available in print,
on microfilm, and especially via electronic databases.
• The library staff can help determine if a specific
periodical is available from the library.
What are Scholarly Periodicals?
Scholarly Periodicals
• Informs the scholarly world of original research in a given field
• Has a serious format
• Contains many graphs & charts few photos
• Regularly uses footnotes and bibliographies
• Written by scholars or researchers
• Uses the terminology and jargon of the subject, assumes reader
knows it
• Published by professional or educational organizations
• Contains little if any advertising
• Example: Journal of Abnormal Psychology
Searching Electronic Databases
And The Web Too
Starting An Electronic Search
Keywords
• Keywords are used when searching electronic
databases and web search engines
• First step - Generate a list of words (keywords) that
describes or is commonly used when discussing your
topic. For example:
– Ozone
– Layer
– Depletion
– Atmosphere
– Hole
Starting An Electronic Search
Boolean Searching/Logic
• Boolean searching - Connecting keywords with
the terms
– and
– not
– or
• For example
– eagles NOT football
– (car or automobile) and exhaust
• More Terms = Fewer “Hits”
Searching More Than Just Keywords
Phrases & Truncations
• To search for a phrase, use quotation
marks
– “survival of the fittest”
• Truncations allow for searching related
words all at once
– The * is usually used. For example:
• psychol* would include: psychology, psychologist,
psychological, etc.
Electronic Databases at the
Mercer Library
Electronic Databases
In General
• Over 40 databases available
• Not every article is available full text
though many are
• Abstracts (summary) is often available
when full text is not
Electronic Databases
In General
• Accessible at any computer
on the MCCC & JKC campus
network
• Most are available off
campus, need to request a
password (forms available
after this class).
• Can print/e-mail/download
articles
Databases with psychology information
• PsycINFO – One of the oldest and largest collections
of article citations. Some articles date back to 1887.
Many articles are NOT available full-text.
• PsycAtricles- Collection of full-text articles (these
articles are also a part of PsycINFO). Some need
Acrobat Reader to view.
• EBSCOhost - Academic Search Premier - Broad
collection covering many subject areas. Not every
article full text, some need Acrobat Reader to view
Searching the World Wide Web
How can I find what I want?
Some things to consider when
searching the web
• Everything is NOT on the web and may never
be.
• The quality of the information on the web
varies greatly.
• No search engine covers the entire web.
• The “invisible web” is huge!
• Though there has yet to be consensus,
estimates put the size of the invisible web
between 2 and 500 times bigger than the
“visible” (or surface) web.
Searching the World Wide Web
Search Strategy
• Searching the Web is much like database
searching:
– Put together a list of keywords describing the
information you desire
– Use Boolean logic (and, not, or) to better define your
search, use double quotes for phrases, etc.
• When searching the web, also:
– Consider which search engines/sites may best suit your
search needs. Different search engines yield different
results.
– Use the search engine’s “advanced search” to select
limiting parameters (language, date, domain, etc.)
The Invisible Web
Why is so much being missed?
The Invisible Web
• When using a search engine, you are searching
a database that represents what is known to
be on the web
• Spiders or crawlers roam the web from link to
link generating this database
• Works extremely well for static all text
pages in the HTML language
• The problem arises when pages are ever
changing or not in HTML
The Invisible Web
So where is all of this stuff hiding?
• By far, a great amount is contained in
databases (both paid and free)
• Other places include:
– Non-text information such as photos or
audio
– PDF formatted documents
– Very new web pages
– Password only access information
The Invisible Web
Finding the invisible stuff
• The key is knowing when you need
“invisible” information and then where
to find it.
• Many web search do not require looking
for invisible web information.
• Search engines work best when looking
for a narrow, focused topic.
Some Invisible Web Information Sites
• www.freepint.com/gary/direct.htm - Direct Search,
large listing of free databases
• www.lii.org - searchable annotated directory of
Internet resources
• infomine.ucr.edu [NO www] - good for searching
academic information
• bubl.ac.uk/link/ [NO www] – links to sites covering “all
academic subject areas”
• www.psychwww.com/ - psych web, info for students &
teachers
• www.fenichel.com/Current.shtml - Current Topics in
Psychology, articles websites & research tools
Evaluating Web
Information
Is this
stuff any
good?
Evaluating Web Sites
• Quality varies greatly from site to
site
• YOU are the sole evaluator of the
quality of information a site
provides
Five Evaluation Criteria
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
•
Accuracy - is it reliable?
Authority - is author qualified on subject?
Objectivity - is the information biased?
Currency - is the information “new” enough?
Coverage - does the info completely cover
the topic?
Search engines may put you out of context,
go the home page or the “about us” page to
help evaluate the site
The Bottom Line…
Buyer Beware
• The web contains a vast amount of information…
but not everything
• Anyone can put information on the web, hence the
quality of web information varies greatly
• YOU will often be the only person to decide if
the quality of the info you find on the web is good
Using the information you find
...and giving credit where credit
is due.
Using the Information You Find
• Always give credit to the author or
creator of the information that you use.
• This includes not only the actual facts,
conclusions, and ideas that an author
presents but also the words that he/she
has used.
Plagiarism can take many forms
• Plagiarism, the presenting of someone
else’s intellectual work as your own.
• It may be done deliberately, but it may
also be done without your realizing it.
• The copying, word for word, from a book
or an article is the most blatant form of
plagiarism.
Plagiarism when paraphrasing
or writing a summary
• Incomplete paraphrasing or summarizing
another’s work could cause plagiarizing without
your realizing it.
• To prevent this, you should avoid:
 Using the original sentence structure.
 Simply substituting a few words here and there.
 Using any of the author's key words or unusual
words.
• Let’s look at an example...
Good paraphrasing
• It takes some effort to do a good job of
paraphrasing.
• One helpful method is to:
1. Read the original sentence
2. Without looking at the sentence, try writing the
idea of the sentence in your own words
3. Look back at the original sentence again to see it
you haven’t used too much of the original language
-Adapted from “Avoiding Plagiarism”, at the University of the Sciences in
Philadelphia webpage: http://www.usip.edu/writing/plagrsm.shtml
Giving credit to the authors you use
• There are a number of formats you can use to
cite the resources in your paper.
• The APA and MLA styles are two of the most
frequently used formats.
• Both style manuals are available at the
library:
– The Publication Manual of the American
Psychological Association, 5th ed. at: BF76.7.p83
2001 (in the reference collection).
– MLA handbook for writers of research papers at:
LB2369.G53 2003 (in the reference collection & at
the circulation desk).
Both manuals are not online though
there are places that can help
• For the APA style try:
http://www.psywww.com/resource/apac
rib.htm
• For the MLA style try:
http://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/
DocMLA.html
Now it’s your turn to get
some information…