DIY Research

You run across article suggestions all the time when you are doing research - articles that professors recommend to you, articles cited in bibliographies and works cited lists, and more.  Here's how to find the text of those articles.

There are two things that you need to track down the text:  the name of the journal and the volume/year when your article was published.

Here's how:

From the library homepage choose the OSU Library catalog from the Quicklinks:

When I'm doing research, I will frequently find a blog post or newspaper article or something that talks about a research study, but doesn't give a full citation for it.  That can be frustrating because the study would be really useful.  Here's how I go about tracking it down.  I'm going to use a specific article as an example, but the basic steps are the same no matter where I hear about the original study.

1. Notice that there is a research study referenced in the original article.

We spend a lot of time talking about how to find articles and journals in the library, but that doesn't mean we're not a great place to find books!

Here's how.

From the library homepage, choose OSU Library Catalog from the Quicklinks:

Open up the Control Panel for your course.  Click the Announcements link under Course Tools.

Click the Add Announcements button on the next page:

Everyone knows that images can make a paper or presentation more visually appealing and more effective.  But images, just like other types of sources, should be used ethically, with respect to the person who created them.

This is especially important when you are giving presentations that might end up on video, or posted to the web.  Luckily, it is easy to find images you can use with no worries.

Don't let Google Scholar lead you astray!

Google Scholar is a great place to scan across a lot of sources at once, but if it doesn't know that you have rights to access online articles and other sources from a library, it might send you to a page like this - which asks you to pay for the article you want:

So you are searching in an article database, and you find the abstract for an article you want, but the full article is nowhere to be found?  Don't get frustrated!  If the OSU Libraries have the article anywhere, you can frequently find it with just a couple of clicks.

Here's a sample set of search results from Academic Search Premier.  I'm using this as an example, but the basic set of tips here will work in all kinds of article databases, not just EBSCOhost databases.

By checking a couple of boxes on a search form, you can improve your odds of finding the sources  that will work for an assignment requiring "peer-reviewed" or "scholarly" articles.

This trick won't guarantee that you find scholarly articles, but it will improve your odds by filtering out a lot of sources that are clearly not scholarly.

From the library homepage, choose Databases from the Quicklinks list.

This will show how to assign grades to ILP questions using the Blackboard grade center.

Access the Grade Center through the Control Panel.

When a student has submitted work, you will see a little green exclamation point in the grade center indicating that there is work to be graded.

Go to the library homepage at http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu (if you click the link now, it'll open in a new window).

Choose Databases from the Quicklinks.

Use the A-Z list (the pink area in the picture below) at the top of the Databases page to go to the L's.