Posts tagged eng 106

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:

This brings you to the OSU Library catalog, a big database of all of the stuff we own (digital and in print) at OSU Libraries.  The best and broadest place to start searching is with a simple (2-3 terms max) keyword search.

Here's a screenshot of the results screen.  The call number system we use to organize the books in the Valley Library organizes the books by subject.  Look to see if you can identify where the call numbers cluster - where there are several books in the same area.  If you are in the library, you might find it easier to just go to the place where that call number is found, and browse through the books themselves.

(Click the image to enlarge)

In the example above, there is a cluster of books in the PR4037-8 area.

If you are not in the library, you can still take advantage of the call number system.  When you see a book with a potentially useful-sounding title, click the title to bring up more information about the book.  At the bottom center of the page that comes up, you'll see the Call Number is a hyperlink.

Click that link to virtually browse the shelf around the book.

You can find more useful information from the book record.  The Location will tell you if the book is at the Corvallis campus, the Bend campus or the Newport campus, or found online:

1. Anything with "Valley" (Valley, Valley Docs, Valley Special Collections, etc. = the Corvallis campus
2. COCC Second Floor = Bend campus
3. Guin/HMSC = Newport campus

The Status will tell you if the book is checked out, available or on hold for someone else.

To find more books similar to a good one, when you find a good one, look at the Subjects (the green shaded area below).

To get your hands on the actual book, once you know you want it -

If you are in Corvallis - use this list of call number locations to find out where the call number is shelved (the first letter of the call number is what you want).

If you are in Bend or Newport and you want a Valley book, use the Request button at the top of the screen to have the book sent to your library.  (Obviously, if you are in Corvallis and you want a Bend or Newport book, use the same button).

If you are a distance student or faculty member located more than 30 miles from Corvallis, use the Request button to have the book delivered to your address.  Choose Extended Campus as your pickup location.

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.

So the other day I was working on a research question, and I was trying to find an article that I know is out there - I know I saw it while I was working on this project.  And I tried and tried to remember the search terms that I used that other time so that I could find it again.

Everyone knows to save their work, right?  (Even if we don't do it as often as we should).  But have you ever thought of saving your research work - saving the stuff you find, and even the searches that you do?  The EBSCOhost databases at the library let you save your work online.  This can be a huge time-saver if you:

Regularly work on more than one computer.

Want a safe backup for your work in case something goes wrong.

Are working with a group of people on the same research project.

Here's how:

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

These steps will work in any database that we get from the company EBSCOhost. If you're not sure where to start, Academic Search Premier is a good starting point for most searches.

Click the link at the very top of the page marked Sign In to My EBSCOhost --

The first time you will need to register with EBSCOhost to create your account.  The link to do this is kind of hard to see --

Create your username and password, and then you're good to go.  You save things to your My EBSCOhost folder the same way that you save things to a temporary folder. Once you have things in your folder, they will stay there until you delete them.

And now when you log on, your folder has items even before you do any searches -

You can create folders within your big folder - save things by topic, or by project name, or by class number, or anything that makes sense to you.

Play around with what you can do here - you can save your searches and more.

If you have any questions, contact me (anne-marie.deitering AT oregonstate DOT edu).

Most article databases let you create lists or folders of articles to save, print out, or email to yourself - basically, to keep yourself organized.

Here's how to do this in EBSCOhost databases.

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

Choose Databases from the Quicklinks list.

This will work with any of the databases we get from EBSCOhost.  If you're not sure which one to use, Academic Search Premier is a great starting point.

(If you're off-campus or using wireless you will be asked for a login - just enter your ONID information)

Do some searches.  When you find articles that you want to keep, add them to your folder by clicking the Add to Folder icon in the search result list.  If you change your mind, click the folder icon again to remove the article.

As soon as you add something to your folder, an area labeled "Folder has items" will appear on the right side of your screen.  You can see what is in your folder there.

You can keep doing searches, and keep adding items to your folder.  When you're done, you can save your folder to your desktop, print it out, or (and this is what you will want to do most of the time) email the folder to yourself.  When you email to yourself, you can use the same trick that you would use with a single article to tell the database which citation style you want to use - this will save you time later when you create your works cited list.

Once you get out of EBSCOhost, your folder will disappear.  If you want to save it permanently, so that you can access it from any computer with an Internet connection, all you need to do is create a My EBSCOhost account.  This makes sense if you:

• Regularly work on more than one computer.
• Don't want to clog up your email, or jump drive.
• Want a backup of your research work, in case something goes wrong.

This post will show you how to do that - Save your research online with a My EBSCOhost account.

If you have questions, contact me (anne-marie.deitering AT oregonstate DOT edu).

Good luck!

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).