Posts tagged comm111

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.

Creative Commons is a project that allows authors, photographers, artists, musicians -- any kind of content creators -- to put a license on their work that tells everyone else exactly how they can use it.

Here's an explanation of all of the different licenses that are available.

Here's how you can use the online photo-sharing site Flickr to search for images with Creative Commons licenses that give you permission to do exactly what you need to do with that image.

Go to the advanced search page at Flickr:

Enter some keywords to find the image you want.  Be creative!  People tag these photos with all kinds of terms - names, colors, cameras, photographic techniques, locations, time periods, and more.

At the bottom of the page, you will see an section labeled Creative Commons.

Checking the box marked Only Search within Creative Commons-licensed content will make sure that all of the photos you find have licenses that say you can use them.  Most of the time, they will ask that you will simply provide attributution (provide a link/ citation crediting the photographer).

Checking the box marked Find content to modify means that you can not only use, but also change (photoshopping, cropping, adding text or captions, etc.) the photos you find.  Check this box if you plan to change the image in any way.

Here's an example of a photo with a Creative Commons license.

[Photo credit:  Oregon State Football Game, Upset #1 USC. Ryan Harvey]

The license is highlighted on the image above with a pink star.  Clicking that link will tell you everything you need to know about what you have permission to do with the image:

Good luck!

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:

The journal in this example is in the OSU Libraries' collection, and OSU students, staff and faculty have the right to access it (and articles in lots of other journals) from any computer with an Internet connection.  With a few adjustments to your preferences, you can tell Google Scholar to point you to the resources that the library provides for the OSU community.

Start your search in Google Scholar (google.scholar.com).  A typical results screen looks like this one.  The first result on this list is the one that led to the pay-per-view screen example above.

To find out which of your results are available from the OSU Libraries, go to the Scholar Preferences link, just to the right of the search box:

In the middle of the Scholar Preferences page, there is a section called Library Links.  Students, faculty and staff at OSU should search for Oregon State because they can access content from OSU online.

Click the boxes next to both OSU options:  Find it at OSU, and Get This Item at OSU.

Now, when you do a search, your result list will look like this.  Notice the new links to the right of each title:

There are also some new options like Get This Item at OSU, or Get This in Print at OSU in the list of links at the bottom of each entry on the result list.

Clicking on these new links will now take you to the library's collections.  If you are in the library, or at an IP address recognized as an OSU address, this process will be immediate.  If you are not on campus, you will need to prove that you have access to the sources the library has paid for.  You do this by entering your ONID login and password at this screen:

This process works well, but it doesn't work perfectly.  If there is an article you want, and you can't get it this way, ask a librarian how you can get it.

Good luck!  If you have questions, contact me or leave a comment.

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.

The third result on that list (marked with a green arrow in the image above) has the full-text available.  For any article with a link that says Full Text, or PDF Full Text, or just PDF, or HTML Full Text (or similar) - you're done.

The other two results, though (marked with pink arrows) don't have that full-text link.  For these articles, you want to click the link marked with the little green circle - 360 Link to Full Text.  This link lets you search for the article in the library's other databases and online subscriptions.

Here's what you will see if you click on the 360 Link to Full Text button for the first article in the example search above:

You are now looking at the page for that article in a different database.  The pink arrow is pointing at the full-text link (just labeled PDF in this database).

After you click the 360 Link to Full Text link, the next screen will not always look the same, depending on where it finds your article.  For example, here's another example.

This article is in the ScienceDirect database, and the full text link is in a tab at the top of the article page.

Unfortunately, the button's not magic, and it can only find articles that the library has access to.  If we do not have a digital subscription to the source you're looking for, you'll see a page that looks like this.  At this point, you can click the link provided to seach the OSU Library Catalog to see if we have a print (hard copy) subscription:

If we do not have the article you want, we can get it for you from another library.  We will always do everything we can to get OSU students, staff and faculty anything they need to be successful in their classes and research at OSU.

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 work in most EBSCOhost databases.  If you are not sure which one you want to use, Academic Search Premier is almost always a good starting place.

Do a search on your topic.  TIP:  use just 1-2 important keywords.  Don't limit your results too much by adding too many search terms.

At this point, you might want to try a couple of different sets of keywords to see which one gets you the best results.  If you don't have enough results, try eliminating keywords.

Once you have a decent set of results, set your limits to get rid of the non-scholarly sources:

On the right side of the screen, you should see these two ticky boxes:

• * Scholarly (peer-reviewed) journals
• * References Available

Check both of these boxes.  The first one will limit to journals EBSCO thinks are peer-reviewed or scholarly.  The second one will limit to articles that have bibliographies available.

Here's the same search, with those limits attached.  Notice that the total number of results decreases from 786 to 64.

If you aren't sure how to get to the article from the results list - help is here.

I can't emphasize this enough, though - everything that is published in a peer-reviewed journal is not  peer-reviewed.  In addition to peer-reviewed, research-based articles, journals provide book reviews, website reviews,  editorials and opinion columns.  These might be useful for your work, but they aren't considered "peer-reviewed" articles.

If you're not sure if a particular article is peer-reviewed, that 's a great question to ask your professor or a librarian.

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.

This trick will work with any database that we get from the company, EBSCOhost.  (If you're not sure which one to use, Academic Search Premier is a good starting point).

If you're off-campus, or using a wireless connection, you might get asked to log in with your ONID when you click on the database.  Once you do that, you should be good to go for your whole research session.

Do some searches and find some articles that you might want to use for your project.  Once you have some articles, there are two ways that you can use the database to get a head start on your works cited list.

FIRST WAY -

Email the articles that you want to keep to yourself.  This is a good way to go if you are not ready to start writing yet.

Let's say that we want to keep the third article on this list - click on the title of the article, Factors Influencing the Scope and Quality of Science and Management Decisions.  You'll get a screen like this --

At the top right, there are a row of icons.  The email one is pretty obvious - the little envelope.  When you click that icon, you get this screen --

Pull down the dropdown menu under Citation Format.  Choose the style you need to use for your paper or project.  When you get the article in your email, the citation information will be formatted for you and you can cut and paste it into your works cited list.

SECOND WAY

You don't have to email articles to get the citation information formatted for you.  This method works if you are in the process of writing your paper and you just want to grab something for your works cited list or bibliography.

Let's go back to that article record -

This time, choose the fourth icon from the left, that looks like a little page (the one without the arrow).  When you mouse over it, it will say Cite this Article.  Click that icon, and the database will create a page with lots of citation options:

Choose the style you want, and cut and paste the citation into your paper.

A WORD OF CAUTION - Sometimes, the citation you get will not be perfect.  Tweak any mistakes (like a title or author in all-caps) before you hand in your paper.

ALSO, if you are using the MLA format, you need to add some information yourself:

Where the labels Library Name, City and State Abbreviation are listed in brackets (the pink area in the image above) - write in information about Oregon State University Libraries and remove the brackets.

Good luck!  Questions?  Email me (anne-marie.deitering AT oregonstate DOT edu).