What I learned about scholarly research

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This past week, our class again had the opportunity to have a class in the library computer lab. Once again, we were with our school's librarian, Laura Cameron, who knew how to search for academic journal articles online. In CARD writing, we've started working on drafting our Rational Argument papers, and we've been assigned to find two academic journal articles that are peer-reviewed and original research. Building upon what we learned last week about the Cardinal Search tactic was learning how to research correctly. Therefore, the goal was for us all to have found our two academic journal articles by the end of our class.

During our session
in the library computer lab, we explored the library resource page that linked good websites to search for academic journal articles; a few of these included Academic Search Complete, JSTOR, Nexis Uni, OmniFile Full Text (Wilson), and Opposing Viewpoints. My favorite of these has to be Academic Search Complete because it allows you to generate keywords; for example, I was able to look up "Qatar World Cup" and "Bidding Process" to enable me to find allegations brought up regarding corruption when FIFA picked Qatar has the host country. We began discussing starting our research and how to use these different search sites to find precisely the information we wanted. Using Boolean Operators, for example, in searching for data, this tool proved pivotal because using "and" allowed for limiting results to a few keywords you input while "or" will enable results for either of your selected keywords. Using phrase searching was beneficial, as it allows words inside a search criteria to be found precisely how you searched it. Last but not least, we learned about using limiters. Limiters is a valuable tool when we want to narrow our search results to things like Peer-Reviewed or Scholarly articles; you can also limit by date to ensure that the information you are getting is still relevant to the topic. All this allowed for simple ease in uncovering specific journal articles related to precisely what you wanted to find.

(My Favorite search site Academic Search Complete)

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