Let's see, just need to get this out of my way.
Okay, so.
Apologies for that. Okay, so I'm Rob Walsh. I'm the Waterbury.
Campus library director, and I'm going to spend a little time this morning talking about strategic searching and what I thought I would do is spend a little bit of time talking about some of the theory some of the ideas, the concept. And then putting that all into action, um.
And play around, I can't see the chat box, so feel free to interrupt at any point. If you have a question, or need some sort of clarification. Um, and.
I'm thinking I'm going to focus on.
Strategies or before you search, right which is often forgotten about, or jumped right over. And then, um.
How to be more effective while you're searching.
How to work with what you find and then.
How do you use what you find to find more? So.
I love my talk with this slide doing research often feels like this, especially for people who are new to the research process, but it doesn't have to. And when you approach the research process.
Yes, strategically hopefully it won't feel so overwhelming.
Strategic searching, I think, um, begins with the understanding that, um.
The research process is not this linear process where you are assigned, um.
A project and find some articles you read the articles you write the paper he gets an, a research is.
More iterative, it's more messy. There's a lot of back and forth and understanding this at the beginning. Will make.
Students more effective with their research.
We're going to spend most of our time at the 2nd, step the 2nd, phase of finding skimming and reading, as I said, we'll see some of.
Inaction some of the things that I talk about as we go forward.
So often, the hardest part of doing research is getting started um, the students just.
Don't know what to look for. So I always recommend that they consult their course materials. The.
The course readings notes that they have, because oftentimes the answers are right in front of them.
Then there's this idea of the difference between interest and curiosity, and I hear all the time from students and I hear from my own.
Um, to high school students, my, my children that I'm not interested in anything. That's okay.
Right and there you're going to be taking classes where you're not interested in certain things. But what are you curious about? Right? The difference being that, like, with interest, you already know something about it whereas when you recognize curiosity, you're recognizing that.
There's a gap in your knowledge and you want to close that gap.
So, I always encourage my students. You can't, but also my high school children to focus on the curiosity parts, especially if there's nothing you're interested in, right?
You'll find something and curiosity will lead to that interest. I promise.
This is also what the social network of research that, um.
Young students don't often think about it, talking to their peers, talking to their instructors and just bouncing ideas.
Off of off of them, right? So.
Strategic searching begins before you even access.
A database, right? Um.
And from here, whoops.
Jump to slide once you have an idea a topic.
It's time to begin brainstorming.
And this is a step that a lot of students skip over.
If you think it is a waste of time, but brainstorming doesn't really take.
That much time, um, what I tell students is think about your topic.
What do you already know about it? What do you need to know? And where might you find.
Those answers, it's as simple as that and brainstorming involves some Pre research, some going back and forth. Um.
Between your top back in Wikipedia, or partially poking around Google.
The number of students 1st, year students I've talked to who've been admonished not to use. Wikipedia is it's wild. Do you think that they're still not being? They're still being told not to use Wikipedia, but Wikipedia is a phenomenal tool. It's not something that you're gonna start with an end with. It's not something you're going to.
A site, but it's a great tool for getting focused to establishing some context making sense of a a messy topic.
And all, this is helpful, it leads to a strategy for when you get into the databases and you can't find anything you find too much. How do you narrow that spend this time?
Before you even get to a database, it's going to prove very beneficial.
Also thinking a little bit is part of the brainstorm process, thinking a little bit about what your research question is actually asking how can you distill the essence of the question? And just just a few words, I hear some really great questions, but then, when I follow up and ask you is, what, what do you actually mean by that?
They're challenged to articulate what was actually meant by that. So, in a few words, what.
Is your topic or question about right? In these words will become.
Your search words, right? Because you don't want to ask a database a question.
It's not Siri, um.
And it's either going to lead to when you ask it database a question, something like Google scholars going into too many results. If you use the psychology database, like, site info, it's going to lead to too few results.
Distill the essence of your topic now I also believe that you can't be a strategic.
If you don't understand what you're doing.
And what you're working with.
We need to explain to students some of the confusing lingo. Um, what is a database.
If you haven't seen, what does it have you ever used a database most likely don't respond by saying no, but then, if you ask them, if they've used Amazon or Spotify, of course, they've used those before. So those are databases database is a collection of information. Sometimes there's a focus.
That can be searched, so contextualizing some of these these strange words, like primary secondary source.
What exactly is an academic or peer reviewed article students have to think peer review. That's what we do in our English class where we have 1 of our classmates read.
An article and yeah, that is it, but in the context of finding academic sources, it is a little different right? And hopefully, no, 1 is still using the term monograph because it doesn't mean anything to anyone who's not a librarian or a professor. So just mystifying. Some of this could potentially.
Confusing language also providing students with some, uh, an opportunity to understand how resources are.
Organize on the library database page, right? 1 thing I do with my 1st, year students my 1st, year of writing students, and students who are in 1st, year seminars is.
I have them go to the libraries database page.
Explore it a little bit and then explain what's there? What kind of content is there and how is it organized.
Um, you know, understanding that there's subject specific databases, and there's more general databases. Now, high school students might not be using a lot of subject, specific databases.
But somehow they find their way to them, and they might be searching a psychology database for articles on, you know, some Shakespeare players or something like that. And they're just confused because there's not that much. So.
Being familiar with the structure with the organization of information, it's going to be incredibly helpful for the students.
My favorite database is Google Scholar, and there are a few things that you need to do to config, configure Google Scholar for off campus access.
I'll demonstrate some of this, uh, and the 2nd, part of my talk.
It's stupid.
Teenagers have grown up with Google, right? They might wanna use a platform that they're familiar with.
But I always give the caveat or add the caveat the, um.
That it can be overwhelming. Google is more of a 1 object, and eventually we're going to want to use some precision instruments. google's going to help us scratch the surface get an idea of the conversation around our research topic.
Contextualize it a little bit then we're going to want to move on to some of the other tools.
So, next I want to move on to some strategies for being more effective.
When you actually get into the databases, and here I want to focus on bullying, searching the, and the or of the not a lot of the databases automatically. And as we'll see.
But it's helpful for students to understand what, and or and not means how you would use and to narrow your results or to to broaden your search a little bit. So, it can.
Includes both terms or multiple terms um.
And not just 1, I'm sorry 1 or the other, and not just 1 of them.
And then using not to to eliminate.
The term that it proceeds, and this is really helpful.
If they're getting too many results, if they want to focus on a specific aspect of a topic and.
Oftentimes they explain this in terms of a Venn diagram and where there's overlap or is.
Both sections of the Venn diagram, um, this.
Give students a visual to understand what these terms mean.
Quotation marks are incredibly.
Useful make results so much more precise. If I did a search for Leopard C home, right? Without the quotation marks, I might get some articles about leopards in the feline sense. Right?
As well, as seals harbor seals, but not necessarily lepers seals by using the quotation marks.
I keep these 2 terms together and it'll pull up a much smaller.
Amounts the 1 thing I'll add here is when students are searching for a single word, they don't need to use the quotation marks. For some reason. I observe many students using quotation marks around a single word. It's not that's not necessary.
Truncation is simply replacing the ending of a word within the asterisks right. To find all variations of that word. It's just like.
Using or right so if I did search for child.
With the asterisks at the end of it, pull up child, child, children, childhood.
Um, it allows us to search a little more broadly.
So, inevitably you're going to come.
A lot of a lot of results.
And how do we deal with those results? What I hear from last students as well? I just picked the 1st, 3 or 4.
Results and that's good enough for me. That's not really good research. Right? It's a lot more complicated than that. So.
I get students to think about the date, the subject and the source type.
I will see some of the databases they're fastest in the margin that will help students narrow the results. We don't get as many with Google Scholar, and that's why, you know, Google scholars grade for starting, but then we want to move into something a little more more specialized.
Um, and.
Yeah, so so always pay attention to what's happening in the margins of a database.
All right, so librarians aren't supposed to say things like judge a book by its cover, but absolutely. Judge an article by its title.
Most articles are pretty descriptive article titles are pretty descriptive and when we have.
3:4:or 5 pages of results just skimming through to see if our key words pop up there.
Is a really good way of focusing on what is potentially most relevant and from.
There after judging an article lifestyle, move on to the abstract, right? This is another 1. that's confusing. Words for students. They may never have heard the word abstract in the context of doing research. Right? The abstract is a summary that appears at the top of most articles. It's going to be their best friend because.
You don't read an article, like, you read a novel where you start with the 1st word and end with the last word, right? Um.
Reading in the academic center, it is very different and that's the discussion unto itself but the abstract is going to help students focus on whether or not they want to read the article more closely or whether it title might not be as relevant as they thought.
In funding, knowing when to move from a broad database, like Google scholar to something more narrow, like like like, info.
We'll see that in a bit.
And last I want to touch upon strategies for finding more a common refrain I hear from students as well.
I haven't, I can't find enough. There are a lot of ways students can use what they find to find additional sources. I don't mean to oversimplify the research process, but.
Sometimes it's about finding 2 or 3 really good articles and then using what's in front of you.
To find other related articles and what I mean, by what's in front of you.
Um, the subject terms in the database, and I'm not saying it's spelled database wrong. It's all good. Um.
How can you use those to identify new search terms? What are some of the adjacent ideas? The things that you haven't.
Thought about it is so concerning how many students that don't look at the references of an article I mentioned before sometimes the answers are right in front of, you.
The same is true with an article. The article did not magically appear.
Out of nowhere if it's a good article. All right it's built on research and.
In theory, the references that site, the research that led to the article.
Are we going to be relevant to the research that the students is doing? It?
Look at the references and then.
Who's using that article, right? So the article you find.
Doing a simple and I'll show in a moment Google scholar search can show you who else has cited it. So, it kind of leads to this.
This idea of citation chasing right it's the idea that research is.
A conversation, the piece that you found is in the middle of the conversation you entered in the middle of the conversation.
But there's a way to find out what happened before you entered the conversation as well as what happened.
After, and the last thing that I want to mention here is.
Searching for other work by by the author.
Scholars tend to be, uh, scholars are experts in their field, and they tend to do similar related research.
Over and over, that's what makes them a scholar right? So do a quick. Google search for the scholar will often bring students to their Google scholar page where they can see a collection of almost like a resume of.
Of their research, so let's put all this in practice.
And I want to begin with, um.
With Google Scholar, and before I begin actually searching 1 of my slides.
Pointed out how you should configure Google scholar to search for the UConn resources, went off campus and to do that.
You go up to this, this orio menu.
And go to settings from there, you go to library lengths and here you would search UConn.
And you could see that you get a list and you'd want to check off these.
You can't library links it's safe.
And your gut can always go back.
The settings to make sure that they are selected.
Okay, so.
Let's put some of what I just discussed into practice. Let's do a search for covid and fake.
Again, I'm using a double quotation marks.
To keep those words together, fake news, right?
I'm just going to do a Google search Google scholar search.
As is typical, the Google experiences.
Over 87,000 results and that's going to be frustrating for students.
So, there are a few ways to narrow things a little bit.
Right there is the date range up here, but, I mean, it's only been around for 4 years. There's not much we could do in terms of the date range, but maybe I want to add and this is where brainstorming comes in something else that I thought of anxiety. Maybe I'm interested in anxiety and by.
Additional search terms, it'll bring my results down a bit anxiety. Maybe I want to add United States.
Now, you're only going to get so far with Google Scholar.
And at some point, you're gonna just want to start scrolling through judging an article by title.
But 1 project that I wanted to, and let's go back to my original search, Calvin and fake news, right? Where I have 87,000 results is if we go.
Back to this little orio icon and we go to advance search.
By default, Google scholar is searching for covid and fake news.
Anywhere in the article, and it may only mention covid once or fake news once. So I want to be a little more precise and I'm going to change that to, in the title of the article thinking that if covid and fake news fake news, as a phrase are in the title.
It's going to be what I'm looking for, and let's just see what happens.
Okay, so there are 5,500. this is a pretty broad topic 1500 results, recovered and fake news are in the title. And from here.
Uh, students can link into.
You the library to see.
The article, um.
And download the PDF right here. What I might do, depending on where I'm going with my research, I might add something like anxiety.
Nothing.
And also, because I spelled anxiety wrong so that's the other thing whenever I just Pro tip 342, whenever I come up with no results. The 1st thing I do is check my spelling cause I'm a terrible speller. Um.
And I spell anxiety correct and imagine that I get a few results. So.
Google is great because it gives you an idea and locates your research in the conversation give some context.
But eventually you're going to wants to go over to use some of the library resources and coming to the.
Homepage in a library, we could do a similar search. Let's try.
covid and here, I'm going to use a truncation with the asterisk. So I'm looking for teams.
Our team teams, teenager, teenage years um.
And this time I spelled anxiety correctly when I search here.
It could show me a lot of different content and what I want to point out is what's going on in the margins. Right? So, 1st, I should point out there's 306 results, but then what's going on in the margins. This allows me to narrow things a little bit. Maybe.
My teacher said just use magazine articles, so I could click magazine articles, apply the filter. And now I only have 5 articles.
I can X out of magazine articles go back. Maybe my professor said.
Um, book material are books, so if I click books.
Click here and here 5 bucks now a lot of students whine when you suggest using books, they're too long right?
Most of these books actually looks like all these books are available as E books and students have immediate access to them.
I can go into the ebook and there's actually lots of ways to search an ebook. This gets back to this idea of reading. Right? Students think that they read a book for research the same way. They read a novel on the beach, right? And when you start with the 1st word and end with the last word, but in reality, what they're looking at.
The chapters made, they're scrolling down and looking at.
Um, at the index right here, and just focusing on the specific section of the book that they're in, that is most relevant.
But also, there's the option to do a key word search to search the book for.
Their work, so this search is really useful to kind of identify different types of materials.
Books articles, magazine, articles, newspaper, articles, et cetera. There's also.
This is 1 of my favorites ways to narrow or search search result is to look at the subject. Right? And with this, I can focus on something really specific like.
Like, female sorry maybe I'm only looking at.
Female students, female teenager do that.
And there's a lot more focused. I want to jump now, go back to the homepage. I want to jump to our database page. What I mentioned earlier is I have students come to this page.
And spend more time, just poking around. What's here? How is it organized? And what I'm really trying to get them to do is to identify that there's a subject.
Drop down and there's a resource type dropped out.
And these are useful for well, maybe I'm taking a psychology class right? So I want to look.
Only at psychology literature, that's where we'll, we'll go in a 2nd, but before we go there, I want to mention resource type. Maybe the professor said I want you to only find newspaper articles.
Click this, and now allow me to focus on our newspaper databases, spending some time getting students to understand how information resources are organized is going to be really helpful to them. Because again, these words like academic articles, peer reviewed articles, secondary sources primary. Sorry, it's new to them.
And then it will help reinforce that I want to go back to all sources. And, as I said.
I'm going to go down to psychology. I'm going to be very specific.
We use a database called.
Just to give you a sense of how this works I'm doing the same search for, um.
Team add anxiety. Let's see what I get. Oh, my gosh. I only get 1 result.
This is so frustrating. Like, I have this really great topic, but there's only 1 article that can't be.
Well, again, it's about using what's in front of you.
What I'm going to do is, okay, the title looks good. Maybe I'll scroll through the abstract, but what I want to point out here are the subjects right? I mentioned these earlier. These will help me broaden my search a little bit. Are there some things that I had, not previously thought of, and looking at this.
Adolescent development I have not considered that. So what if I click here.
Doesn't want to let me oh, there we go quick. Here is rerun my search for adolescent development. Now there's 56000.
There's something maybe I'll add cove in here.
So, covered in the context of adolescence development.
And I can come back to the margins and I said, okay, so I want to limit my.
Results to academic articles, because my professor said use, or my teacher said use academic articles and then there's further subject.
Headings where I can narrow it even a little bit.
More right, so again, paying attention to what's going on in the margins is going to be really useful for when you run into that wall when you only come across. Um.
1 result the last thing I want to point out cause I'm realizing I'm running low on time is.
Once I have an article, I'm just pull this 1 up.
Taking the time just roll through.
Hopefully does not ask me for 2 factor authentication.
Um, I have to request this 1. okay. Bad example, what I wanted to get at is.
The reference is, uh, um, let's see if I could choose and.
Actually.
I saw them right there in front of me in the database instead of pulling this up, it says cited references.
Again, this is going to help students creates or to understand the conversation a little bit better. Right? These rate related reference are cited references.
Are going to be related to their topic. This is how this article came to be.
I mentioned following the conversation forward and to do that, it's just as simple as.
Coming across title, that sounds promising maybe for the abstract I identified it as being relevant.
I'm going to copy this I'm going to go back over to Google Scholar.
And with google's scholar, I could see that it's been cited by 2 other people. So this.
We'll allow me to identify 2 other potentially relevant. Um.
Relevant sources, and kind of build a web off of that. 1, that 1 article that I found. So.
Being cognizant that I am just about out of time um.
Are there any questions I encourage and when I upload the slide.
I'll add some hyperlinks, but I encourage anyone to reach out to me at any point. Gladly like, gladly discuss this further. If there are 9 questions now, they might.
Some might pop up later and I'm just like, I tell my students, like, it's not just about throwing all this information at you and, like, kind of your heads are spinning. It's more like this is the beginning of a relationship and, um.
Feel free to reach out and we can, we can talk some more.
You Rob, that was really, really fantastic. Thank you. Thank you.