Off The Shelf

Often we will get calls from learners looking for theories, for instance “theories of leadership” or “theories of learning.”

The funny thing about theories is that they don’t refer to themselves as such … at least not inside peer reviewed articles, they don’t.  I. e. — If you search for “theories of learning” in the scholarly article databases you will probably get cruddy results.

Question:

So where are the best places to identify the names of highly influential theories?

Answer:

• Textbooks
  E.g. your course textbooks that you have accumulated from your courses over the years
• Subject-specific encyclopedias
  Click Reference Shelf on the libray’s home page.
• Lists online
  Some people have enough time to create lists of theories and post them online.  Note that these could be from star academics or shady people.  (Investigate who is behind them.)
• Books
  Go to Articles, Books & More on the library’s home page and scroll down to ebrary, netlibrary or PsycBOOKS.
• Literature Reviews
  Find these inside the Discussion section in relevant articles or search for “literature review” in the title

Once you have the name of the theory THEN you can go find scholarly articles that discuss the specific theory you are looking for (e.g. articles discussing the finer points of Transactional Leadership).  You’ll almost always have more luck if you leave out the word “theory” from your search.

Therefore, “transactional leadership theory” becomes “transactional leadership.” “Constructive learning theory” becomes “constructive learning.”  You’ll get a much wider pool of results if you search that way.

More Tips:
Cited Reference Searching can help you find out which articles are most seminal.  Google Scholar helps automate this process.   Use bibliographic mining to trace a specific theory back to the original author.  (Highlight in-text references from the article’s discussion section, match them to citations in the reference list, and then see whether the library has the full text articles using Journal and Book Locator.)

– Erika

Many of you have noticed changes to the ebrary database. Last week ebrary changed not only how the database looks, but also what you need to do to read a book.

To search for a book, choose the search option at the top of the page. From the results page you can view the entire book by clicking the title or see just the table of contents.

You no longer need to download the ebrary Reader to see the content of a book. All books will come up under Quick View, but you will need to use the ebrary Reader if you want to print, highlight, or save a book to your bookshelf.

The link to the ebrary Reader is just above the Quick View’s image of the book.

Ask A Librarian if you have questions about using the new ebrary.

- Erin

Many of you have noticed that IEEE is no longer available in the library. We were unable to renew the database for this year, so our IEEE subscription had to end in December of 2008.

So, what are your search options post-IEEE?

• ACM Digital Library
• Science Direct
• Interlibrary Loan
• ABI/INFORM

I’ll go into each of these with a little more depth.

The ACM Digital Library is from the Association for Computing Machinery. It contains journal articles, transactions, and conference proceedings from the ACM and affiliated organizations. It is a great resource for all types of IT research, and should be most learners’ first stop.

This winter we were able to increase the number of IT journals available through Science Direct. Often overlooked by Technology learners, there are some great resources in Science Direct.

Interlibrary Loan allows learners to access articles we don’t have in the Capella Library. The IEEE Xplore database may be gone, but that doesn’t mean you can’t ever access IEEE materials. If you find useful IEEE articles or conference proceedings by searching Google Scholar or when perusing a bibliography, you can request the full text using the Interlibrary Loan form.

ABI/INFORM is mostly a business database, but it does contain some helpful IT journals, especially if you are looking for articles in IT project management. When your topic starts to cross over to another discipline, it’s a good time to use databases designed for both.

For more help picking the right database, or finding the right articles, you can always Ask a Librarian.

- Erin

When people talk about the internet, they tend to talk about how how much better it is than the print world. It’s fast, multi-media, and intricately connected. The screen is far beyond what paper could ever be.

BUT . . .

All this talk about the fabulous features of the internet can blur one important way that the internet is just like paper. The internet is simply the delivery service, not the content.

In the print world you’ll see a wide variety of content, and most of us are very good at identifying and evaluating that content. For example, most of us immediately know that all of the following can appear on paper:

• grocery lists
• how-to instructions
• maps
• family photos
• news articles
• legal cases
• scholarly research papers
• conference proceedings

Plus, we can identify each paper item quickly and will which ones are most appropriate for academic research papers.

Yet, when many of us see those different items on a screen (and if you think for a moment, you’ll realize that all of the above can be found through an internet connection) our ability to identify and evaluate items breaks down.

For example, if an acquaintance hands you a paper flier originally printed by an unknown source that’s been passed through dozens of different hands, you’d probably really question the authenticity of the statements in it.

But somehow, email forwards don’t get that same level of scrutiny.

Similarly, a person can post a webpage using the same amount of time and energy it takes to write a manifesto and tape it to the side of a bus shelter.

Now, you’d probably stop and think before citing a bus shelter screed in your assignment, but on the internet, everything looks kind of the same. The clues that tell you something should or should not be used are less apparent.

But that doesn’t mean that all things on the internet are equal. Because almost everything on the internet is just a version of what exists in the physical world (printed matter, film, etc.), the first thing you should do with anything you find online is try to compare it to a real-world item you know about.

Is this a home video?

Is this an advertisement trying to sell me something?

Is this a research paper from a reputable academic journal?

Is this a pamphlet from a health organization?

Is this the rantings of a lunatic?

Is this a government research report?

Not only will knowing this help you determine what you should believe or use in a research paper, identifying the nature of the content will also help you create the correct APA citation.

APA citations are based on the content, and electronic versions of the content require an extra bit of information in the citation, not an entirely different citation.

For more help evaluating items from the internet, see our PDF guide Evaluating Internet Sources or our Evaluating Your Sources tutorial.

- Erin

We receive a lot of questions about how to limit searches in the Sage databases so that you find only full-text articles. There are two options for making sure that your results are for full-text articles only.

The first option is to select one or more of the full-text collections that we subscribe to from the SAGE Full-Text Collections choices.
The second option is to choose SAGE Content Available to Me to search all the Sage titles that are available in full text for Capella learners. This second option will help you find more results than the first choice as it will search the full-text collections PLUS any Sage journals we subscribe to that aren’t part of a collection.

-Kim

Many RefWorks users have asked about what happens after graduation.  You have hundreds of citations organized in RefWorks leading up to graduation day, and does it all then disappear?

No, it does not.  RefWorks is currently part of the Capella Alumni Library, which will allow you to keep the information you have stored inside the RefWorks database.

You can also export your RefWorks database to another citation management tool, such as EndNote or ProCite.  You can even create a full bibliography of all your citations as a Word document.

And, for those of you who’ve heard one too many dissertation horror stories, you can create a backup version of your RefWorks database.

Both of these options are available in the References menu.

- Erin

Many of the library databases added additional journal content recently.  Most include large year ranges (e.g. 2000 to present) or entirely new titles:

Advances in accounting
Advances in international accounting
ALTER – European Journal of Disability Research
Asian Journal of Psychiatry
Brain, behavior, and immunity
Computer Law & Security Report
Education for Chemical Engineers
Forensic Science International: Genetics
Forensic Science International: Genetics Supplement Series
International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice
Journal of Consumer Psychology
Mental Health and Physical Activity
Neurotherapeutics
Systems Engineering – Theory & Practice
Science & justice
Sport management review
Research in organizational behavior
Research in Transportation Economics
Performance Evaluation
Policy and Society
Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Chronicle of the American Driver and Traffic Safety Education Association
Education Business Weekly
Developmental disabilities bulletin
Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues
International Forum of Teaching and Studies
International Journal of Educational Management
Journal of College Reading and Learning
Journal of Research in Rural Education
Literacy, teaching and learning
Perspectives on Language and Literacy
Performance Improvement
Planning for higher education
School community journal

You can find these titles using Journal and Book Locator.

– Erika