Literature HOMEWORK

Journal Databases Activity (Assignment)

Introduction

In this activity, you will practice searching for peer-reviewed journal articles. Let’s begin by nailing down

some terms:

Journal article

What is the difference between a “journal” and a “journal article”? Many people who have grown up in

the internet era aren’t sure. This is because they may never have held a physical journal in their hands.

Basically, though, a journal is a collection of articles (i.e., “journal articles”). Just as one issue of the

magazine People or Sports Illustrated will contain many different articles on different topics and by

different authors, one issue of a journal will contain different articles on different topics and by different

authors.

Peer-reviewed

“Peer review” is a form of gatekeeping. Before an article is published in a peer-reviewed journal, other

experts on the topic review the article and assess its quality. The article cannot be published unless these

reviewers find that the work is good enough to justify its publication. (This is the ideal. Reality doesn’t

always align with the ideal, of course.)

It’s possible to find peer-reviewed journal articles through an open web search, but most scholarly

publications reside behind a paywall. For example, most scholarly articles that you find through a Google

search will probably be available in full text only for a fee. Don’t pay this fee. Instead, access the article

through your school library.

There’s a certain unfairness to the aforementioned paywall. For example, our tax dollars support a good

deal of research that is reported on in scholarly journals. Why don’t we have open-web access to these

research findings? It’s a good question.

But setting this larger matter aside, the purpose of the activity that follows is to help you develop–or

further develop–strategies for quickly finding scholarly articles relevant to your research project (and to

inquiries you carry out in the future). Some of the articles you find while working through this activity

may end up being articles you write about in your Library Research Report, which is due at the end of

Week Two.

Overview

This Activity has six parts:

PART ONE: Review Basic NU Library Info

PART TWO: Try Smartsearch

PART THREE: Try Proquest -or- Ebsco (your choice)

PART FOUR: Use One Source To Find Another

PART FIVE: Practice Known-Item Searching

PART SIX: Determine If a Journal Is Peer Reviewed

To get started, open a new word-processing document on which to record your answers to the

numbered items that follow. There is also a template for you to use located in the assignment module.

Remember to save early and often.

Important: Please read all of the information in this document. If you try to read only the numbered bits,

skipping over the instructions and explanations in-between, you will very likely experience frustration.

You also will not learn the search concepts as well.

PART ONE: Review Basic NU Library Info

Go to the NU library homepage (library.nu.edu) and scroll down, looking for information about library

hours and ways to contact the library. Answer the following questions.

1. How would you access the National University Library?

2. If you have a specific question for a reference librarian, what is the quickest way for you to get help?

3. Under the heading “Resources & Collelctions” on the library home page, which link(s) will take you to

resources for this course, ILR260?

4. What link(s) will take you from the NU Library home page to request books or journal articles for

which the library does not provide ready access or have within its own collection?

Tip: This handy Student Services guide points to many of the most relevant resources and services of the NU

Library: https://nu.libguides.com/students

PART TWO: Try Smartsearch

SmartSearch is a “metasearch” tool that many of you will have already used. It allows you to search most

of the library collection—magazines, books, academic journals, videos, reference books, etc.– from a

single search page. It’s a bit like Google in that it’s often a good place to begin your research.

Before heading over to SmartSearch, quickly remind yourself where you are in your project. Having

completed the work of Week One, you have gained at least a beginning sense of some useful search

terms for your project.

For example, suppose you were researching this question:

“Do students learn as well from electronic textbooks as from print textbooks?”

In developing a beginning set of search terms, you’d almost certainly choose

electronic textbooks

What other search terms might you use? A strong search will include a term for each major concept

covered by your question. For example:

students

learning

electronic textbooks

Notice that what you are trying to emphasize are nouns and noun phrases. In this way, effective library

database searching is very similar to open web searching. As helpfully explained by the business

research expert Robert I. Berkman, search engines are most helpful to us when we feed them terms they

can “chomp down” on (Find it Fast, 2015, p. 101).

5. What is your own current research question?

6. What are some search terms you might use to begin searching for articles that will help you answer

your question?

7. Using SmartSearch, find one peer-reviewed journal article that seems potentially useful to your

project.

To get started with SmartSearch, go to library.nu.edu

Keep “Everything” selected, and type some of your search terms into the search box. Then click

on Search:

You will now see the full search interface and probably many results. Notice that SmartSearch provides

helpful little icons to help you quickly understand the type of source represented by each item on the

results screen:

Since in this Activity you are searching specifically for journal articles

that are likely to be suitable for use in your Library Research Report

(and later in your main project), go to the left-side menu and select

“Peer-reviewed Journals”:

It’s likely you’ll get at least a few results with your first search—and

perhaps thousands. If you don’t get any results at all, try different,

and possibly fewer, search terms. (You might also check your

spelling.) The database will organize your results according to the frequency with which your terms

appear in the article, whether or not they appear in the article’s title, etc. The more your terms appear in

the source—especially in the title—the higher up in your list of results the source will be.

Check out the first one, two, or three pages of your search results. Do you see any articles that look

potentially useful to your project? If you’re not finding relevant sources, try some different search

formulations until you arrive at one that yields at least one relevant result. Keep in mind that a “relevant”

result doesn’t necessarily mean an article on your exact topic. A relevant result is any article that will be

helpful to you in addressing your research question. For example, the peer-reviewed literature may not

contain a lot of articles specifically about new companies such as Uber and Etsy, but it will contain many

articles on home-based labor and independent contractors.

In conducting your library search, use the synonym list that you’ve been developing since Week One.

And continue developing the list. Be ready to make a change and look for new opportunities. This is the

key to effective research. Find at least one (1) article that looks potentially useful, and copy key info (i.e.,

author/s, title of article, title of journal, date of publication) into your document as item #7.

Don’t worry at this stage about the citation format. Be an active and engaged searcher. If one set of

search terms doesn’t work, keep trying.

8. Access the full text of the article you’ve just found—and take a screenshot to demonstrate that

you succeeded in accessing the full text. Remember that SmartSearch allows you to search multiple

databases at once. Clicking through to

articles housed on different databases can

sometimes be tricky.

To access the full text of an article, first, click

on “Full Text Available”:

Then look for links that will take you to the

article. Many articles are available through more than one database:

These links will open in a new tab.

The first time you click on an article

link, you will be asked to log in using

your NU Single Sign-On credentials.

If one link proves to be a dead end…then return to your search results page and try another.

And don’t hesitate to ask for help from a librarian if you get stuck!

Once you find the full text of your article, take a quick screenshot of the article’s first page (to

demonstrate that you succeeded in navigating to the full text).

Not everything that appears in a peer-reviewed journal is a peer-reviewed article.

For example, most scholarly journals include book reviews. You may also find brief news reports in

scholarly journals.

Be aware, too, that SmartSearch, because it is pulling data from many, many different databases, often

misidentifies things like magazine articles as peer-reviewed journal articles.

Things to notice:

• Content. Begin reading the piece. Does it sound like a news item or a book review? If so, then

that’s probably what it is. If you’re not sure, consider also…

• Length. Is the piece very short? Book reviews and news items are usually much shorter than

peer-reviewed articles.

• Credentials. Is the author’s institutional affiliation noted, or is there a description of the author’s

credentials? This information generally accompanies a scholarly article.

• Citations/references. A scholarly journal article will almost always include both in-text citations

and end references.

Don’t hesitate to ask for help when you are confused about the nature of a source you have

located.

PART THREE: Try Proquest -or- Ebsco (Your Choice)

It is not a good idea to be entirely reliant on one search tool—even a terrific one-stop searching tool like

SmartSearch. Two major multidisciplinary database collections you might turn to instead of SmartSearch

are ProQuest and EBSCO. Being familiar with ProQuest and EBSCO is important even if you decide to

begin all of your searches in SmartSearch. This is because SmartSearch more often than not will end up

directing you to ProQuest or EBSCO to retrieve articles.

To access ProQuest or EBSCO:

Optional Viewing

For a science-fiction portrayal of one-stop searching gone

horribly wrong, check out a clip (link below) from the 1975

film Rollerball, in which a single computer contains all of the

world’s collected information, and then that computer fails:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=vDWKJPu7hIw#t=3m3s

• Go to the NU library home page: http://library.nu.edu/

• Click on Find Articles:

Choose ProQuest or EBSCO and run a

search using some of the search

terms you’ve used with success to this

point in the class.

Then filter for results that are peer-

reviewed and available in full text.

ProQuest peer-reviewed and full-text checkboxes:

EBSCO search options:

The more

research you do, the stronger your sense of good search terms will be.

As you discover key

terms related to your

research, it’s a good

idea to write them

down.

9. What search terms

are you using? List some

of them for task #9. (It’s

okay if these terms are

identical to the ones you

listed in item #6, as long

as those terms are

working for you.)

10. Formulate a search using OR or NOT (or both). A search that uses OR will broaden your search;

using NOT will narrow it. Here is an example of a search that includes both the OR and NOT operators:

“electronic books” OR E-books NOT software

Try your own search using OR or NOT (or

both). Remember to continue filtering for peer-

reviewed articles. Include a copy of your own

search formulation as item #10. (Your “search

formulation” is simply what you typed into the

search box.)

11. Generate a citation for one peer-reviewed

article that seems possibly relevant to your

research project.

After running your search from #10, review the first couple of pages of results. Do they include at least

one article that is relevant to your inquiry?

To make this determination, quickly scan the titles and any preview information. Make a more careful

examination of promising results by viewing abstracts and skimming the beginnings and major

subheadings of articles.

If you’re not finding relevant sources, try some different search formulations until you arrive at one that

yields at least one relevant result. And again, don’t be afraid to reach out to a librarian for assistance.

Once you’ve found a relevant article, you can open the full record by clicking on the title of the article:

Now click on the “Cite” icon to generate a citation for the article:

ProQuest citation tool:

EBSCO citation tool:

Item #11 is your database-generated citation for a peer-reviewed article.

Computer-generated citations often contain errors.

You will need to hand-correct these for your formal reports and papers. (The citation generator will still

save you a lot of time, though). Common citation-generator errors include presenting information in

ALL CAPS and listing the author’s first name first (instead of last name first). Always proofread these

citations when including them in the final version of a paper.

PART FOUR: Use One Source To Find Another

There are many ways to use one source in order to find another. One is to search the References section

of a relevant article for other articles that may be relevant to your project. This will lead you to articles

older than the one you’ve already found. Another strategy is to find out who has cited your article. This

will lead you to articles that are newer than the one you’ve already found.

Here in Part Four, you will practice the second strategy using Google Scholar. (SmartSearch does

contain a “Cited By” tool, but it is, for now, less powerful than the one provided by Google Scholar.)

12. Use Google Scholar to find an article that cites an article you’ve previously found and to generate a

citation for that article.

Use information from one of the articles you’ve found to find a listing for that article in Google Scholar.

Google Scholar doesn’t contain everything, but at least one of the articles you’ve found should be

indexed in Google Scholar. “Indexed” means that Google Scholar includes publication information, and

possibly an abstract (in some cases Google Scholar may also include the full text).

Go to scholar.google.com and use whatever combination of search terms brings up your article. Then,

click on the “Cited by” link:

No “cited by” link? If your article is very new, or simply hasn’t been widely read, it’s possible that no

one else in the Google Scholar database will have cited it. Try searching again with a different article.

Skim the results for a source that looks potentially relevant to your project. Consider using an additional

keyword to further refine your results (that is, to get more relevant results and fewer irrelevant results).

Alternatively, you might look for a term that is common to irrelevant results you are seeing, and filter

your search to eliminate sources that contain this term.

To search within your current set of results, enter your additional search terms, check the “Search within

citing articles” box, and then click on the search button (screenshot below).

If you still don’t find a relevant source, then, just for practice, use any source.

Generate a citation for a source you’ve found by clicking on the citation tool, which looks like quotation

marks:

Item #12 is the citation you’ve found through

Google Scholar.

Not everything indexed in Google Scholar is peer-reviewed.

If you find a source in Google Scholar, you can better determine the nature of this source by

working through the “things to notice” list that appears earlier in this document. You can

also look up the journal title in Ulrichsweb (Part 6 explains how).

PART FIVE: Practice Known-Item Searching

Most of the time you will begin your research with subject and keyword searching in large database

collections (as you did in Part 2). Eventually, however, you will find yourself wanting an article other than

one you’ve pulled up through keyword and subject searching within the library.

For example, the References page of an article you found during your original round of searching may

include citations for additional articles that you’d like to get your hands on. Or maybe a search of Google

Scholar has led you to some sources that sound potentially useful. On these occasions, you will need to

do what librarians call “known item searching.” SmartSearch provides the most efficient way to check to

see if the NU Library collection provides access to the item you are seeking.

For example, suppose you want this article:

Rice, J. (2008). Rhetoric’s mechanics: Retooling the equipment of writing production. College

Composition and Communication, 60(2), 366-387.

With SmartSearch, finding this article is easy. The title contains many terms, making the search very

precise. You plop the first part of the article title into SmartSearch and the full text listing comes right

up.

But let’s look at a slightly trickier example:

Spencer, S. (2005, June 1). Blogging for dollars. Multichannel Merchant, 22 (6), 34-36.

What makes finding this article a little trickier is that the title “blogging for dollars” has been used by

many authors, not just this one. In this kind of situation, you may need to narrow your search by adding

additional terms, such as the author’s last name or a term or two from the journal title.

For Part Five of this Activity…

Imagine that you are interested in some articles that are referenced in articles you’ve previously found.

Or maybe you learned of these articles while web surfing. The articles seem potentially relevant to your

research project so you want to figure out if you can get these articles in full text through the NU library.

Your set of tasks is to find each of the four articles (listed below the images--tasks 14-17), in full text,

through NU library databases. Once you bring up a screen displaying the full text of the article, take a

screenshot of the beginning page of the article (see images directly below) and copy it onto your

document (as in item #8 of Part 2).

Please remember to take a screenshot of the actual beginning of the article (not merely an abstract

or index listing).

You are doing this

in order to quickly

demonstrate that

you were able to

find your way to

the article itself.

You are doing this

several times

(rather than just

once) for practice

purposes: the

repetition and variation will help ensure that when you need to do your own known-item search, you’ll

be ready to go.

Don’t worry about presentation, or about what appears at the top of the frame you are capturing. Just

dump the screenshots into your Word document.

Gather beginning-of-full-text screenshots for the following four articles:

13. Draa, V., & Sydney, T. (2009). Cyberbullying: Challenges and actions. Journal of Family and Consumer

Sciences, 101(4), 40-46.

14. Subrahmanyam, K. & Greenfield, P. (2008). Online communication and adolescent relationships. The

Future of Children, 18 (1), 119-146.

15. Spencer, S. (2011). How SEO myths can cost you. Multichannel Merchant, 28(10), 6.

16. Young, K. (2009). Internet addiction: Diagnosis and treatment considerations. Journal of

Contemporary Psychotherapy, 39(4), 241-246.

SmartSearch doesn’t index everything in the library.

*Note: In one of our Week Two tutorials, an NU Librarian demonstrates advanced known-item searching.

Be sure to check out the tutorial!

PART SIX: Determine If a Journal Is Peer Reviewed

Since massive indexes such as SmartSearch contain meta-data errors, it is important not to trust them

blindly: SmartSearch’s listing of a source as peer-reviewed is not a guarantee that the source is peer-

reviewed. It is important to know what peer-reviewed sources look like— and what they don’t look like.

You may want to check back to Part Two of this Activity if you did not attend carefully to the “Things to

notice” list in Part Two of this Activity. A good tool to add to this list is Ulrichsweb. In Ulrichsweb you

can look up the name of the journal in which an article appears in order to determine if articles

published in that journal are peer-reviewed.

How to access Ulrichsweb

• Go to the library homepage at https://library.nu.edu

• Click on the “A-Z Database List”

• Ulricsweb is under the “U” tab on the “A-Z Database List”

How to use Ulrichsweb

Please view the following video demo (running time approx. 2½ minutes): http://tinyurl.com/ulrichs-ilr

Remember: Ulrichsweb is an index of journals, not of individual journal articles. So when you search in

Ulrichsweb, you are searching by the title of the journal, not the title of the article. Put the title of the

journal in the search box.

To complete this activity, determine whether the articles listed below arefrom peer-reviewed journals.

Answer YES or NO for each item.

17. Draa, V., & Sydney, T. (2009). Cyberbullying: Challenges and actions. Journal of Family and Consumer

Sciences, 101(4), 40-46.

18. Subrahmanyam, K. & Greenfield, P. (2008). Online communication and adolescent relationships. The

Future of Children, 18 (1), 119-146.

19. Spencer, S. (2011). How SEO myths can cost you. Multichannel Merchant, 28(10), 6.

20. Young, K. (2009). Internet addiction: Diagnosis and treatment considerations. Journal of

Contemporary Psychotherapy, 39(4), 241-246.

If the name of the publication has a symbol that indicates it is refereed, it is a peer-reviewed journal:

Submit your answers to the Journal Databases Activity assignment submission page, located in the

Course Work tab.