6.3 Collecting Academic Sources
Jackie Hendricks; Amy Lueck; Loring Pfeiffer; and Maura Tarnoff
Navigating Your Library
A great place to start when seeking various sources, including scholarly, popular, and gray literature, is the library. Familiarize yourself with the SCU Library’s website [Website], where you will find a rich array of resources. However, we know that when you first enter that website, it can be intimidating. Where should you start? First, we want to assure you that the resources you need will become much more familiar the more you use your library’s site, particularly if you ask for help. First, let’s take a look at the SCU Library home page [Website]. On the main library page, you can see a search box with several tabs for different ways to find sources in the center; you can chat with a librarian (see “chat with a librarian” on the right-hand side); and there are also other helpful links to various library resources and events.
Figure 6.1. Library Home Page
Check who your subject librarian [Website] is—that is, a librarian who specializes in certain fields. There is a librarian specialist for engineering, one for fine arts, one for history, one for English, one for math and computer science, and so on. You can ask any librarian about research, but you will be given specific help on your projects by one of these highly trained specialists.
Look at the research guides [Website]. Research guides help you find tools, resources, and methods for your research. Often, the subject librarian will have compiled resources for your specific discipline, and possibly for your specific course, which means you don’t have to go hunting around.
Contact the library and ask for assistance. The rule we generally follow for researching is this: if we spend more than five minutes looking for anything and we can’t find it, we contact a librarian [Website]. We also suggest chatting with your peers about your research work, taking advantage of your instructor’s office hours, or meeting with writing partners from The Hub writing center [Website]. There are friendly experts ready to help you at any stage of a research project, whether you’re feeling stuck, excited, or somewhere in between.
Apply It: Developing Key Terms and Search Terms
Now, let’s begin the search! Before consulting various search engines or databases, you can prepare by brainstorming search terms you’ll try out to find sources of information and knowledge. Although Google allows users to search for their entire question (e.g., Which sustainable energy sources are best suited to California’s different climates?), other databases require users to use words or shorter phrases for their search terms (e.g., sustainable energy sources AND California). It’s good to get in the habit of using search terms, as it makes you think carefully about your topic and search terms can be used in any database. Your search terms should generally draw from your research question, including keywords and concepts related to your topic. You’ll also want to brainstorm alternate terms for each concept in order to expand your search results.
Identify the main concepts in your research question by selecting nouns important to the meaning of your question. Leave out words that don’t help the search, such as adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and sometimes verbs. Nouns that you would use to tag your research question so you could find it later are likely to be its main concepts. Stick to the nouns and only what’s necessary, not already implied. Don’t read in concepts that are not really there. Be alert to words that may have connotations other than the concept you are interested in. For instance, if you identify depression as a main idea, be aware that the search engine won’t automatically know whether you mean depression as a psychological state, a condition of the economy, or a weather characteristic.
For each main concept, list alternative terms, including synonyms and singular and plural forms of the words. Sometimes, synonyms, plurals, and singulars aren’t enough. So also consider associations with other words and concepts. For instance, it might help, when looking for information on the common cold, to include the term virus—because a type of virus causes the common cold. Make sure your terms aren’t too broad or narrow for your intended purpose. Figuring out this balance takes practice and may vary with each search.
An important thing to remember is that searching is an iterative process: we try search statements, take a look at what we found, and, if the results weren’t good enough, edit our search statements and search again—often multiple times. Most of the time, the first statements we try are not the best, even though Google or another search tool we’re using may give us many results.
Database Searching Tips
When you have your search terms ready, it’s time to begin searching. If you are asked to find scholarly sources, you’ll want to begin in the library databases. At SCU, we use the FOLIO system to find sources. This search system will look through the library’s book and journal collection, online resources, and specialized databases to find sources for you. You can use the tutorial in “Library Services Platform Migration” [Website] to learn more about navigating the FOLIO system. The video below also walks you through the process of searching for an article in FOLIO.
Below are some tips and tricks for a focused search in the library databases:
- Quotation marks: search for an exact phrase
- For example, “higher education” specifies that you want that exact phrase and that you don’t want to see sources where education appears one place and higher appears somewhere else.
- Truncation/Wildcard Symbol/Asterisk: searches for all of the variable endings of a root word
- For example, searching for develop* will return results with develop, develops, development, developmental, and developmentally
- AND/OR: Same as in Google, “AND” and “OR” can be used to adjust the parameters of your search.
- Parentheses: specify the order of your search. These terms need to be fully capitalized to function correctly.
- Particularly when we use “OR”, we can use parentheses to specify how it should be interpreted. If we are interested in researching early childhood obesity, when considering our search terms, we can identify that there are a few ways to talk about early childhood. The resources could use terms like “pediatric” or “infant,” for example, and we want to include them in our search. If we search for “Early childhood” OR pediatric OR infant AND obesity, we’ll get some unusual results:
That’s not what we want, but if we add parentheses and search for (“Early childhood” OR pediatric OR infant) AND obesity, we get:
That’s exactly what we wanted our search to do!
Specialized Databases
A specialized database—often called a research or library database—allows targeted searching on one or more specific subject areas (i.e., engineering, medicine, Latin American history, etc.), for a specific format (i.e., books, articles, conference proceedings, video, images), or for a specific date range during which the information was published. There are several types of specialized databases, including:
- Bibliographic: details about published works
- Full-text: details plus the complete text of the items
- Multimedia: various types of media, such as images, audio clips, or video excerpts
- Directory: brief, factual information
- Numeric: data sources
- Product: model numbers, descriptions, etc.
- Mixed: a combination of other types, such as multimedia and full-text
Specialized databases can be general, covering a wide range of subject areas in order to give broad returns on different topics and search keywords. These databases, such as Academic Search Complete, enable you to find research across various fields and can be useful when you want to see a broader scope of how a topic is discussed and analyzed.
There are also field-specific databases that give you search results within a particular area of study. These are helpful when you know the specific research approach you are interested in for your topic (“PsycInfo” for a psychological approach, “Film & Television Literature Index” for film studies, ScienceDirect for a STEM approach, etc.). Within the field-specific databases, there are ones that address social justice and representation issues in academic research, such as “Ethnic NewsWatch.” We recommend using one or more of these databases to ensure that you are not overlooking marginalized or underrepresented voices in your research. To find the specialized databases in the SCU library system, go to the library homepage [Website] and select the “Databases” tab. From there, use the “Subject” drop-down menu to choose an area of specialization (English, psychology, ethnic studies, etc.) to find databases that return sources in that field. To find more general databases, go to the “Databases” tab and choose “General & Reference” from the “Subject” dropdown menu. That will connect you to databases like Academic Search Complete.
Using Your Sources to Find Sources
Finally—and this applies to all sources, both print and electronic, popular and scholarly—try looking at the sources that your source uses by checking their footnotes and bibliography. In online materials, these sources are usually linked. Also, if you are using Wikipedia to get oriented on a topic, you might want to look up some of the sources for that article that you can find at the bottom. Above all, looking at what an author is drawing on to capture the conversation on your topic will likely lead you to more sources—and sometimes better sources—than you originally found.
How to Google Effectively
For many people, Google is the first place they turn when it’s time to learn more about a topic. However, despite its convenience, Google is not always the most reliable way to find reliable information on a topic or scholarly research. To ensure more robust search results, there are some tips and tricks to use. Keep in mind that the Database Searching tips for using keywords can also apply to Google.
It’s also important to know that when you do a Google search, you might get different results than the person sitting next to you. Google search results are heavily influenced by algorithms, keywords, advertisements, and even social biases. Often, the first page of results will be almost entirely “sponsored” links, and many searches begin with an AI-generated summary of the results. Searching Effectively [Website] provides a useful guide to help you navigate the process of evaluating the Google search engine and develop effective strategies for using Google (and other search tools).
Once you’ve evaluated your Google search returns, you can begin looking for sources related to your research topic:
- Brainstorm your various search terms
- To search within a certain website or source, write site: sfchronicle.com before your search terms (e.g., within the San Francisco Chronicle website); or use any other URL. For example, you can use “site:.gov” to search only government websites.
- Try using “AND” or “OR” between two or more search terms.
- “AND” will limit your search.
- “OR” will expand it.
- You can also combine these with step two. For example, try “site: sfchronicle.com racial profiling AND immigration AND trauma” if you’re investigating the psychological effects on immigrants of being racially profiled.
Using Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a special case, somewhere between the open web and library databases. Google Scholar lets you search for scholarly sources using natural language phrasing (instead of strict key terms), just like you can in your favorite search engine, but it focuses on scholarly sources. Here are a few tips:
- Google Scholar search returns are linked to Santa Clara University’s library. Connect to your university library by searching for it under the Google Scholar menu under settings. Choose the library links option and type in the name of your institution. Check the box to make the connection. Once you make the connection, you’ll be asked to log in to your library whenever you use Google Scholar. Search returns you can access through the SCU library will include a “Find it @ SCU Libraries” link.
- If Google Scholar links to an article available on the internet but with a paywall, look for it in the SCU Library instead. Article links may only provide abstracts and request that you pay to access the full version, which you should not do. If this happens, take note of the bibliographic information and look for it in the SCU Library databases.
Google Scholar also helps you connect to other relevant articles. In addition to using the references at the end of the article as you can with any article, you can see other articles that use the one you have found as a source. Click on the “Cited by” link under an entry, and you will get a list of the scholarly sources that include that article in their reference lists. This feature enables you to search forward in time using an article, a feature not available in library databases.
Be careful using this search engine, however. Not everything indexed in Google Scholar is actually scholarly or trustworthy. Although it does a good job most of the time, you’ll want to evaluate each source.
Also, don’t assume that because you have searched using Google Scholar that you have found everything. Accessing the databases through your library will yield more thorough and specialized results, so you’ll want to check there too.
Attribution
“Collecting Academic Sources” by Jackie Hendricks, Amy Lueck, Loring Pfeiffer, and Maura Tarnoff is adapted from several sources, including “Your Research Journey” from Why Write? A Guide for Students in Canada by Nancy Ami, Natalie Boldt, Sara Humphreys, Erin Kelly, Shailoo Bedi, Jemma Llewellyn, and Monica Connes, used under CC BY 4.0; “Finding Sources” from Reading and Writing Successfully in College: A Guide for Students by Patricia Lynne, used under CC BY-SA 4.0; and “Dive In—Databases, Search Terms, and Evaluating Sources” from Reading and Writing Your World by Dan Curtis-Cummins and Jolie Goorjian, used under CC BY 4.0. “Collecting Academic Sources” is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
Media Attributions
- infant + obesity graphic
- AND graphic
