Spanish 202 Library Research Guide / Dr. De Grave

Critical Thinking + Research Strategies = Information Literacy

Library Web pages are your research source of first resort.

What's there?
A - Z Index Site Search Books, Articles & More
Links to media sources in the online reference shelf

How do I . . . ?
Research Rescue Library User's Manual

Article Databases

Core Databases by Discipline examples: Foreign Languages, Art or Biology
Academic Search Elite is a good starting place-- it's interdisciplinary and a good mix of popular & scholarly materials: journals, magazines and newspapers
Newspaper Databases list

Practice & to review:

1. Take the library Web Tour available from the Library research tutorial tILt
   • Use the red forward arrows to go through the tour.
   • On each page move your mouse over the image to learn about the collections services and help available.
     
     
2. Go back to the Library homepage Explore the category Books, Articles & More especially Article Search and the Online Reference Shelf . Look at Need Help? especially Research Rescue
   
   • Write down two research tips and two sources that you will be able to use again in your class research. _______________________________ ________________________

   Locating & using peer-reviewed sources and citing research materials
   
   Evaluating and Citing What is Plagiarism? Why care?

Practice for upcoming assignments:

1. Determine several artists that you might want to research using Reference books LANIC or ArtCyclopedia
2. Current online news is available using Newspaper Databases or the online reference shelf media list
3. Search Academic Search Elite , a good starting point for current academic research. You can narrow your search to scholarly information by clicking "peer reviewed" and add your keyword search terms. Click "full text" to limit to only those articles available electronically. Once you are viewing an article abstract, click FIND IT! to determine if the article is in our library second floor periodical collection.
4. Read several article abstracts. Will these articles be useful? If not, repeat steps 1-3, change your topic or refocus your search using the database subjects listed with the abstract or the database thesaurus.
5. Describe the process of locating the full text of this article using Citation Linker in about 5 steps.
6. Now widen your search to include other journals. Try your search again by searching "core" databases from an appropriate Core & More discipline.
7. Pay attention to how you would cite these articles, especially if they are in online-only sources.
8. Discuss your research "discovery" process with your classmates: what worked, what didn't?
9. Review the Duke University Plagiarism examples.

Academic Success TIP: Do-it-yourself information literacy
The three tILt lessons are designed to be an overview of and practice of research skills basics: selecting sources, searching for, evaluating and citing sources.

For research help: library.reference@uwec.edu  836-3858 Ask us/tell us

Karen Pope  popekj@uwec.edu   

updated: September 21, 2005