GE 106 Spring 2008

Scholarly Article Search Exercise

Where to start? This assignment calls for you to find information linked to one of the development indicators you found for your selected country. Importantly, it calls for you to find this information in a very specific kind of source: a scholarly article. Your Internet and Google skills will come in very handy when you search the scholarly publications, but at this point it is important to know that this is a specialized search using specialized tools and will require you to develop new search skills. As mentioned, your existing search skills will be useful to you, but please keep in mind that the rules for finding scholarly information can be quite different than those of a random web search. At any time you feel frustrated or like you could use some help, please contact a librarian, and we will be delighted to help you in anyway we can. You can also use the chat window on the left and send an Instant Message to the librarian on duty during regular library hours.

Start With Your Assignment Instructions:

The place to start any academic research project is with your assignment's instructions. The key is to be sure to provide all of the information your instructor is asking for. This is vital, many students do quality work but lose marks for not providing everything the assignment asks for. So we will start this example by reviewing the assignment instructions.

Specifically, we will want to focus on this key passage:

For the homework assignment you will find and cite two scholarly articles that shed light on changes in one of these indicators for your country. This can be changes already observed over time, changes predicted for the future, or targets set by governments. You need only to select one indicator but you need to find and cite two articles.

After reading this, we can make a list of the things we need to do and also translate the instruction into key action items. (Note: the list is drawn from the entire instructions, not just the quoted section.)

Find two scholarly articles (we need a specific number of sources and not just any source will do)
The articles need to discuss some sort of change in one of our indicators (we have some freedom in choosing what kind of change we are looking for, it just has to be linked to one of our indicators)
After we choose our two articles, we need to cite them fully, preferably in APA format.

So, now that we are perfectly clear on what we are being asked to deliver, we can start searching.

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Next Step: Reference Works

In a nutshell, this assignment is asking us to find academic researchers discussing what changes in our indicator mean. In order to do this, we'll need to know how academic researchers talk about the indicator. Chances are good that they will use terms and vocabulary other than the official UNDP wording.

For my example, I'm going to use the indicator Percent of total energy supply from coal. So before I start searching databases, I'm going to find some background information on what this means. To do this I'll go to the Library's Reference Collection and look in a few reference volumes and encyclopedia. I've chosen the following three. (For help finding appropriate reference works, just ask the nice people at the reference desk.)

Encyclopedia of Global Change GE 149 E47 2002
Conservation and the Environment GE 10 C68 1995
Natural Resources HC 103.7 N278 1998

You should all be familiar with finding information in encyclopedia, so I won't go into all the details except to point out that while there is no entry for "Coal" in the Encyclopedia of Global Change, the is a long section under "Coal" in the index that gives us much of the information we need. We will find coal linked to concepts such as carbon dioxide, electrical power generation, energy policy, fossil fuels, and mining. We also will find other entries about carbon dioxide emissions, annual growth of production, energy content, and energy content compared to traditional crude oil and gas reserves. This information gives us a context to understand what the indicator "percent of total energy supply from coal" means. We learn coal is not a clean source of energy and that more developed economies are trying to phase out coal dependency, while energy hungry developing economies are growing their coal resources at a very high rate. Now that we know a little more about what the indicator means and the concepts that scholars link it too, we can go to the library's databases and search the scholarly journals efficiently and effectively.

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Using the Library's Databases:

The scholarly resources your assignment asks you to find will be found using the library's databases. The databases collect scholarly research, newspaper articles, and many other forms of data and information. Reference Librarians are available to help you select the appropriate databases for your search, and to help you learn to navigate them.

Starting out, I recommend you begin with our Databases By Subject guide and more specifically, our Biology, Environment & Natural Resources guide and our Public Affairs & Criminal Justice guide. These guides will help you select the databases that will have the information you need. Keep in mind that many databases are highly specialized and have extremely high quality materials in a very narrow field. This means you will want to pick the right database for your search and you will absolutely want to search several databases to find your articles.

Some individual databases that may have useful resources for you:

ProQuest Direct
A very good general databases that indexes thousands of journals, newspapers and magazines in all subject areas. Be sure to check the scholarly journals, including peer reviewed box for your search, as ProQuest has many non-scholarly sources that will not be appropriate for this assignment. Click the FindIt! button to locate the full text of articles when it is not provided. (Click here for more on retrieving articles.)

Academic Search Complete
This is another excellent general database with scholarly materials from all the disciplines. Be sure to check the scholarly (peer reviewed) journals box. Click the FindIt! button to locate the full text of articles when it is not provided. (Click here for more on retrieving articles.)

JSTOR
Provides access to articles published more than 2 years ago in over 100 scholarly journals. JSTOR is a small database, but it has very high quality resources. To search here you will likely want to use advanced search to select a narrow range of subjects and be sure to sort your results by date.

Environmental Sciences and Pollution Management
This is a highly specialized index of environmental sciences literature, including over 6000 scientific journals and thousands of other sources such as conference proceedings, reports, monographs, books and government publications. It contains some excellent coverage of issues raised by this assignment. Note: the FindIt! button does not function in this database, so please search Griffin for the title of the journal or ask a librarian to help you find the full text of articles listed here.

PAIS
PAIS is a great resource for searches concerning public policy. It is an index to books, articles, conference proceedings, government documents, book chapters and statistical directories about public affairs. Be sure to use the "peer reviewed journals" tab to filter out other kinds of information. Click the FindIt! button to locate the full text of articles when it is not provided. (Click here for more on retrieving articles.)

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Finding An Article, A Visual Walkthrough

Now that we have done some background research on our indicator and selected some databases to search, it is time to start searching. So following the link to Proquest, let's start with the search screen. First, we'll enter in terms from our reference research. Pay attention to the red circles, they highlight the search area, the scholarly journals filter, and the help feature.

When the results come on the screen, browse through the list and check the box to the left of titles that look interesting. Also, be sure to look at the Suggested Topics listed on the top of the screen. These provide excellent ways to expand and improve your search.

Clicking the box on the left adds articles to you My Research folder. You can view these articles by clicking the tab at the top of the screen, this will also allow you to see the results of searches you have entered. Be careful, all information will be lost when you close your browser window.

Next, try clicking on some of the more promising suggested topics. Also, you will want to revise your search by trying alternate wordings or other terms from your research.

Continue trying many searches. Allow yourself to follow leads by clicking on topics or trying new search terms. Use the checkboxes and My Research to revisit previous searches and articles. When you are finished, click on my research and look at the articles there more closely. Once you have a bunch to compare you can start examining them more closely and deciding which will be more useful.

Now our job is to review these articles and choose the ones that fit in with our assignment requirements. To do this, we will want to read the abstracts of the articles. Abstracts are brief statements that quickly state what the article is about. You can see that our first step in evaluating articles is reading the title, the second step is reading the abstract. Only on the third step will we be actually reading the articles themselves. Click on the article's title to find the abstract and other detailed information.

At first glance, this abstract might not appear to deal directly with our indicator (percent of total energy supply from coal). However, on a closer inspection, it shows itself to be very appropriate. First, its main focus is on coal-fired power. Second, its focus on renovating old inefficient and polluting coal plants with Clean Coal Technologies means that it directly measures the issue that makes our indicator important. Coal dependence, or percent of total energy supply from coal is important because coal is a "dirty" power source and contributes heavily to global climate change. Making coal plants more efficient would help make coal dependence less of a bad thing.

Now that we've established the relevance of the article, we need to get the full text and read it to be sure our guess is correct. To do that, click the FindIt! at WSU Libraries button (circled on the right of the screen.)

The FindIt! button searches for the journal the article appears in in our Griffin catalog. In this case, it found a subscription in our Science Direct journals, and we can download and read the article by clicking on the Go button. If the article is not found in our holdings, you can use Interlibrary Loan to order a copy. (For more help obtaining full text of articles, try the library's help page on that topic.)

When we read the article, we can see that in the introduction the authors talk about the projected changes in the percent of energy supply provided by coal. "Despite the increased utilization of natural gas in the power sector in Russia (approximately 62–65%), it is projected that the coal share in the fuel balance throughout the country will be increased, in the near future. " We have found our article.

Now, when it comes time to find the second article, we can use the other articles on our marked list plus what we've learned from reading this one. Because we've started our search correctly, now we have momentum built up and each new thing we learn helps up find newer and better resources. After reading this full article and learning more about our indicator, we will be much better equipped to quickly decide whether new articles apply to our project or whether we should keep looking.

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Citation Help

APA format for citing electronic journal articles from the Purdue Online Writing Lab
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association: Reference BF 76.7 P83 2001
Writers Reference: Reference PE1408 .H2778 2007

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