TRANSCRIPT: Information Literacy: How To Excel In College Research

Speaker: Laura Kohl 

Information Literacy: How To Excel In College Research

Hi, my name is Laura Kohl, and I'm a librarian. I've been working in libraries of all types for over 20 years. I've developed a real passion to help students navigate through their college research. Today we're going to talk about information literacy. So what is information literacy.

It's the ability to determine the need of information that you have, the ability to locate that information, the ability to evaluate the information you find, the ability to synthesize that information, and finally, the ability to use that information ethically or cite that information.

The Information Cycle

When determining what kind of information you need, it is important to keep the timeframe of when the publications are published in mind. So the first kind of information that's out there is informal communication. These might be text messages you received or information that you find on social media immediately following an event. After this, you're looking at web-basted news sources, things like cnn.com, where news might be published just several hours after a particular event has occurred. After this, we're looking at newspapers. Whether they're online on in print, these publications are very often done about 24 hours after an event has occurred and will provide you with some basic background information.

After this, we're looking at things like magazines. Materials like this often have more in-depth background information. And examples of these would be things like "Time Magazine" or "National Geographic." After this, we're looking at things like scholarly publications. These are very often published about six months to a year or more after an event has occurred. And the reason for this is that articles that are published in scholarly publications very often have to go through a peer review process and have to be updated and made sure that they're of high quality before they're allowed to be published.

Finally, we're looking at things like books and government publications, which can be published a year or more after an event has occurred.

Where To Go

So where do you go to find information? We all go to the Web, things like Google, Wikipedia, social media, and blogs. But there's more to the web, there's more information out on the Web than just that. There's also the hidden Web. So these are things that you can find through your library's catalog, library subscription databases, or non-governmental organizations, for example, will report data within their websites. You can't just Google something and find this information there. So what should you do? You should make use of your library's catalog to search for books, DVDs ,and other materials. You should also make use of your library subscription resources, so articles and other materials can be found that way. So be sure to make use of your library's resources.

What To Research

It can be hard to think of a topic to research. Think about some things that you mite be passionate about.  Think about some class discussions or some readings maybe that you've had that you want to research further. Sometimes your topics are just assigned. When you come up with a general idea you want to expand on that particular idea. So there are a couple of tips for that. The first is brainstorming. You can write your general idea on the center of a piece of paper, set a timer on your phone, and write down all the words that you can think of that have to do with that particular topic, and make some connections between those terms and come up with a more narrow idea.

Another thing you can do is you can set up a concept map, and you can just write, again, a term in the center of a piece of paper, and then you can think about that particular term, so let's say environmentalism is a term that you're thinking of. You can think about that term in a few different lenses maybe environmentalism and psychology issues, maybe environmentalism and finance issues, maybe environmentalism and sociology, and think about different terms that relate to those particular lenses around your central topic, and make some connections and come up with a narrower idea to focus your research upon.

Developing Keywords

So now that you've developed your research topic how are you going to find your resources. You can't search in library catalogs and library databases the way that you can on the open Web. You can't search something like "how does the gas mileage of my car affect my carbon footprint." You will have a very hard time pulling back results that way. You want to pull out the key concepts for that particular issue, so you might want to search gas mileage and carbon footprint. Additionally, not everybody is going to write about your topic using the same terms that you are.  So you want to think about synonyms or alternative terms, and in this case, for gas mileage you might want to search "miles per gallon," or for carbon footprint you might want to search "environmental impact." As you locate some more sources, you may also find some other key terms that are used within those sources that you can use to further search your topic.

Boolean Operators & Wildcards

So how do we make the most of the key terms that you found when you're searching in library catalogs and library databases? You want to use something that's called "Boolean operators." So what are Boolean operators? Boolean operators are the words and, or, and not. The word "and" will help you connect two disparate terms, such as solar and wind. If you want to find articles that discuss both solar and wind power, you can search both of those terms with the word and in between. The word "or" will search for articles that have either term, so you can search solar or wind and you're going to get articles that will talk about either/or, and it will cast a much wider net, and you'll get more results back. 

Finally, there's the word not. If you want to search for all the articles in a database that cover the word "solar" and "not wind," you would search solar, not wind, and you'll pull back articles that discuss just solar issues, with no wind discussed in those particular articles. Finally, you can also use something called "wild card." So what this is is an asterisk added to the beginning or the end, or even the middle of a word, where a prefix or a suffix could possibly change that term. So if you want to search environmental and you can add an asterisk to the end of that word, it will pull back any article that discuss environmental, environmentalism, environmentalist, and so on. This can really help you do a power search rather than having to conduct lots of different searches separately.

Locating Books

So what about locating books? These are things that you want to use if you want to take a very in-depth look at an issue. You want to make sure you have some detailed background or get some history on a particular topic. Using your library catalog is the best way to locate books, and we're not talking just print books. We're also talking about e-Books and audio books. You want to make sure that you are using the key words that you've developed to search your library's catalog. When you find a book, pay attention to the other key terms that show up in the library book's record. Those may give you some ideas for other search terms. 

Additionally, your library may be part of a consortium where you can request books from other places, and it will be delivered to your library in just a matter of days. Also, there's a process called "interlibrary loan" where books can be ordered from anywhere in the world. Bear in mind that these are coming through the mail, so you want to make sure you've giving yourself plenty of time to get these materials.

Finally, make sure you evaluate your books. If you're writing a paper on the current financial market, you don't want to use a book on finance from 1972. Also, just pay attention to the audience for the book. Make sure you're not using a book that's written for juveniles. Make sure you're not using a self-help book for something that you really need a scholarly book for.

Differences Between Sources 

When you're searching in library databases they're going to include publications of many different types. So what types of publications are included in library databases? The first type are scholarly journals and scholarly articles. These are things that are very often written by researchers or professors. They're very often peer reviewed, which means that they are delivered to experts in the field who require resubmission of those materials with fixes and edits and things to make it more up to par before it's able to be published. They often include original research, an analysis in data. These things can really help provide some solid evidence in your paper to help you support your argument. An example of a scholarly journal would be something like the "Journal of the American Medical Association."

The next time of publication are trade publications. These are things that are written for professionals in a particular industry. They're very often written by professionals in a particular industry or paid journalists. These are going to provide trends and news issues in that industry to help anyone do a better job within their particular industry. So something like "Stores" is a magazine that's written by the National Retail Federation. Anyone who works in retail would want to pay attention to this particular journal to stay up on the news and trends.

Finally, there are popular publications. These are things like magazines and newspapers, and they're written by paid journalists. These are going to provide some news on an issue. They're going to be very approachable with they're language, as they're written for the general public, and they're going to provide some great content and background on a particular issue. And they're very often -- an example of them is the "New York Times" and "Time Magazine."

General Vs. Specialized

So when you've chosen your topic, how do you know which library databases to search within? There are general databases that you can search any interdisciplinary topic within, but there are also specialized library databases as well. These might include things like psychology databases, communication databases, business databases, or even medical databases. These very often have specialized tools that you can use to focus your topic down a little bit further.

For example, if you're writing a paper on ADHD in children or juvenile, you can search within a psychology database for ADHD and then limit to experiments that have been done focusing on children or adolescents. This will pull back articles that are going to focus more directly on your particular topic. Additionally, your library may have subject guides that will guide you to the best databases on your particular topic, so make sure you make use of those. Finally, your course sites may include some resources as well, so pay attention to that.

Activity 1

So now that we've reviewed some of the different types of sources that are out there, let's see what you know. Take this quick quiz and see how ya do.

Compare Your Answers

How do your answers compare?

Locating Internet Sources

So what about locating sources just out on the Internet? There's lots of websites, blogs, governmental information. Should you use it in your paper? You can certainly use a lot of these kinds of sources in your paper. The thing that you need to do is evaluate the source. So ask yourself a couple of questions. Who, how, and why?

When you're thinking about who, you want to think about who put that piece of work out there. Who is the author? A lot of times on a website you can find the author at the top or the bottom a page. Sometimes they're even hyperlinked with some of their expertise listed out. If not, you can try Googling that person, see if you can find a little bit more information to determine their expertise and credibility to write on that topic. If you can't find an author of a publication, take a look at the organization that put that web source out there. See if you can find an "about us" section or mission statement to determine who they are and whether or not they're qualified to write on a particular topic. Ask yourself how. How are they putting that information out there?

Does it have grammatical errors? Are they including data to back up any of the point that is are included? These are important things to keep in mind. 

Finally, ask yourself why. Why is this information being put out there? Is it to educate or inform you? Is it to persuade you to a particular way of thinking? Is there bias included? Is it to sell you something? These are really important things to keep in mind to determine whether or not something is of credible evaluations to use in your papers or projects.

Activity 2 

Now that we've talked about evaluating web sources, let's put it into practice. Given the topic on the screen, take a look at these two resources and determine who, how, and why. Finally, would you use one of these sources in a college-level paper or presentation? Why or why not?

Our Evaluation 

Here's how we evaluated the sources.

Advanced Search Tips

When locating resource on the Internet, you can use advanced searches within search engines like Google to help narrow your results. So you can narrow to things like .govs, .edus, or .orgs for example. The way that you want to do this is enter your search term into the Google search box and then add the work "cite:.gov; for example, to limit to government publications. You can do the same thing with .orgs or .edus. Additionally, you can use advanced tools that will allow you to limit to the time that something has been published. So in Google you can limit to things that have been published within the last 24 hours, or within the last year, for example.

Keeping Track

So there's so much information that you're gathering together as you're doing your research, how will you keep track of it all? One of the ways you can do it is save PDFs to a folder on your computer or a cloud-based service. Another thing that you need to pay attention to is, as you're searching in library databases, a lot of databases will only have a temporary link to that particular article that you located. A lot of times students like to bookmark that article in their browser, and very often you won't be able to find that article when you go back to locate it again and use it in your paper.

What you want to do is make sure you're paying attention to find a persistent link, and so very often that will have a little chain-link icon listed in the record for that article, and that persistent link is something that you can then save. So you can save these persistent links via e-mail, a word document, or a cloud-based document, and you can track those materials that way.

Additionally, there are third-party tools that often live in the browser of your computer or on your computer directly, and you can use those third-party tools to locate and gather those resources and keep them all in one location.

Annotating Resources 

So now that you found your resources, what's the next step? You really want to manage your time appropriately to make sure that you're going to be synthesizing your materials really well, and one of the keys to that is annotating those materials as you're going through them. So as you're reading, don't just highlight materials, but take notes, whether in the margin of that particular article or on a separate piece of paper. You want to write down the main points and the arguments that you're finding that particular resource. This will allow you to make interconnections between the disparate sources that you're finding and you're able to use them and synthesize them in the best way possible.

Matrix Tool 

So, when you're thinking about synthesizing your resources, there are a few different methods that you can use. One would be taking notes on index cards and organizing those index cards together according to the main point or argument of those particular articles. That way you're keeping track of them together. Another method that you can use is to insert the main points of a particular article within the outline of your paper. And by inserting those citations you're able to track where each article fits best in the paper or project that you're putting together. Finally, you could create a matrix that lists out the sources and their main points using a Word document, so this way you're able to pay attention to which items work best with others. So this way you're able to make connections between certain articles that are going to support the same arguments that you have at different parts of your paper. Here is an example of how you can use the matrix tool.

Use the matrix tool to keep track of main ideas included in each of your identified resources. List the sources by author or authors' name, and then by the different topics that need to be supported by research.

Finding Similar Sources

So what happens when you find a really great source for your paper? You want to find similar sources to that particular source. The first thing that you can do is look at the work-cited page for that source. Check out their articles and the books that they used. You can use your library catalog or databases to search for their sources. Additionally, your library's databases may include a "find similar search" function. So if you find a really good article in the library database, look around that article and see if you can find a link that says "find similar," and you'll pull back some similar sources.

There's also a great tool in Google Scholar, so you can search for materials in Google Scholar, and you'll often see a link that says "cited by." What that means is that that article has been cited by lots of other articles, and if you click on that link, you're going to find all the newer publications that have since cited that first article that you were really interested in.

Citing Your Sources

To use your sources ethically, you need to be sure that you're giving proper credit to the materials you're using within your papers, so this means citing your sources. You need to make sure you're citing your sources, whether you're just sharing an idea that you've read about, paraphrasing, or quoting. There are different types of citation styles out there. Very often your professor will assign a particular style for you to use for a paper or project. Whatever way you use it, just make sure that you're being consistent with one particular style. There are some third-party tools that you can use that will help you track your resources and will also end up producing a correct bibliography or work-cited page for you. Additionally, some of the library databases will produce citations for you as well. So just be on the lookout for those as you're locating resources in the library databases.

The other thing to make sure is that you keep an example of a correct citation handy. Some of the databases might produce small errors in their citations, and so you just want to make sure that you're tracking that before you turn in your paper or project.

Conclusion

As you're honing your information literacy skills, navigating through your college research, by sure to pay attention to all of the different resources you have available to you. Your college library is available to help you, and you can contact your college librarian in many different ways. You can stop in and see them, you can call them or e-mail them, and very often you can text them on chat with them online. Additionally, you should talk to your professor or classmates about help with your college research. You can also work with your writing center or even your local library, so be sure to reach out to any of these people to help you through your college research.