Putting It All Together
Just one more recap to make sure we’re all on the same page!
Research topic selected? Check! Information need defined? Check! Keywords and related term brainstormed through presearch? Double check! Search tool selected and located on the library website? Check and check! Let’s start searching!
Let’s put this all together with an example:
You receive an assignment from an instructor: Pick a topic; it can be anything. Gulp.
First off, don’t fret, remember, we got this! Second off, reviewing the assignment a bit closer we notice there are some restrictions on the topics we can select. Need to have one newspaper article and one scholarly article (source types defined for us!). And it needs to be related to a recent issue, narrowing our information need even further.
OK, as a COCC student, maybe higher education is a topic that appeals to you because you live it. So we have a really broad research topic that we need to narrow down. Since we need to focus on a recent issue for a topic, let’s review some higher education issues in the headlines with a little presearch using news search tools.
We remember the Current Events & Controversial Issues subject guide has some search tools that allow us to browse, so we navigate to that page and open up America’s News. We click the first link to Find a Topic, and click on the broad topic of Education. From there, we review the narrower topics, click a few links, read a few news articles to find something that really speaks to us, and focus on student loan debt forgiveness as our “just right” research focus. Thank you presearch!
From the presearch, we made notes about main concepts that we could use for keywords: college, student loan, debt forgiveness. We know we’ll need to combine these in to a search statement and, since we want all of those main concepts to appear in all of our results we use AND. Our search statement looks like this:
college AND student loan AND debt forgiveness
During our presearch, we found a news article that helped us focus our topic but that would also work well as one of our sources. The assignment required at least one news article so we’re good to go with that! That leaves us with one last information need: a scholarly article focused on student loans and debt forgiveness.
We’re pretty specialized at this point, so to select a search tool we go to Resources by Subject and look at the Education guide. We review the search tool descriptions and select Educators Reference Complete and ERIC. All that’s left is to enter our search statement in the search tool and select a source!
The best part about using library search tools is that there are a lot of ways to refine your searches without ever having to change your keywords. Watch and consider the following video demonstrating how to search in Educators Reference Complete.
Now that we’ve done one search there and found a source, watch and consider this second video demonstrating how to search in ERIC.
Remember, the