Agenda: Discuss our experience with research, practice coming up with search terms, practice the advanced search to find relevant research, have fun and learn something new!
Objective: You will be utilizing these research skills in your classes to write papers, complete projects, and to begin your career after college! These foundational research skills are the beginning of the type of research and knowledge that you will be using throughout your college and professional careers.
You will be able to:
Library Session Handout (Google Doc)
Exercise 1: Listen/read through this video/video transcript on the Debunking the Myths of OCD and jot down or circle any words or phrases that scholars might use in articles about this topic. Mark up the transcript and/or use section 1 of the worksheet.
Exercise 2: Pair & Share
Turn to the person next to you or find a partner in the class and spend 3 minutes discussing both of your potential topics and search terms. Use this conversation to help you complete Section 2 of your worksheet. First, record your research question and highlight/circle the unique concepts within it. Next, create a search strategy to use in library databases by brainstorming potential search terms for each unique concept.
Exercise 4: Using APA PsycINFO
Use the search terms you brainstormed above to locate one source in APA PsycINFO. Complete sections 3 & 4 of the worksheet.
Advanced Searching
Let's say you want to do a research project on girls perceptions of STEM.
Research Question: How do gender stereotypes affect girls' career goals?
Keywords: girls, STEM
! TIP: Using synonyms is great to find relevant articles!
Using AND, OR, NOT
AND is used when you want to include two things together. In this case, we are looking for girls AND STEM
OR is used for any synonyms you come up with. For example, girls AND (STEM OR science).
NOT is used to exclude any terms that are clogging up your research. In this case, we want to look at girls and STEM. If many of the results we're getting talk about nursing, we can exclude any result about nursing by writing girls AND (STEM OR science) NOT nursing.
Quotes and Asterisks
The quotes ("") will keep a phrase together. This is useful in the case here of "gender roles" where we want to ensure that those two words appear next to each other.
The asterisk (*) will search variations of a keyword. For example, stereotyp* would include stereotype, stereotypes, stereotypical, stereotypically...
I encourage you to watch the following three short videos after the library session. They will help you prepare to utilize library resources to find more information related to the articles you will be discussing in your Psychology class.
Once you've had a chance to watch the videos, visit the Psychology Research Guide to use the database APA PsycINFO or discover other useful resources to help you complete your research.
If you need research help, feel free to email or schedule an appointment to meet with me.
