Off The Shelf

Have you been scouring the Internet and the library databases looking for that perfect measurement instrument for your research study? For your dissertation? How do you know if it’s a quality instrument and if it’s the right instrument for you? 

Check out this article from the January 2007 issue of gradPSYCH –

“Finding the right tools: Student researchers need to know what to look for in a measurement instrument.”

This article will outline the steps you need to complete when choosing an instrument, including:

• Knowing what you need and what you need to measure.
• Befriending your librarian
• Doing some quality control
• Getting permission

The library has access to all four of the databases mentioned in this article: Mental Measurements Yearbook, Tests in Print, PsycINFO, and Health and Psychosocial Instruments.  You can access these databases from the library’s Articles, Books, and More web page.

For more information on finding tests and measures in the Capella Library, please review  the guide Finding Tests and Survey Instruments on the library’s Guides and Tutorials page (scroll down to Resources for Doctoral Learners).

If you have any questions, please contact us in the library!

~Jennie

If you have a specific title in mind, you can always check Journal and Book Locator and search for that title.  But did you know that you can also run a search to find all the journals in the library that have certain keywords in their titles?  For instance, if you want to see if we have journals about sports psychology, you can run the following search:

Journal and Book Locator search

(sport* will search for any word that starts with the word sport: sport, sports, sporting, etc.)

 You will get the following four results.  Note that two of them are not located in databases that you can find on the Articles, Books and More page:

Journal and Book Locator Results

This brings me to another method you can use to find articles from our stand alone journals:  Search databases with the Full Text box unchecked.  Most databases actually index more journals than they include full text.  By searching with the full text feature off, you will get additional results.  In fact, if you’re a doctoral learner working on your dissertation, we recommend that you always search the databases with the full text limiter turned off to make sure that you are conducting a thorough search of the literature.

When you run a search without limiting to full text, you will then naturally get some results that will not have a full text link.  Instead, some of the results will say Check Article Linker or Linked Full Text (Ebsco databases) or Link to full text (ProQuest).  Simply click on the link to see if the article is available in either another database or from one of our stand alone journals.

To continue with our sports psychology theme, you would pick an appropriate database for your topic, in this case PsycINFO, and then run a search such as the one below, making sure to uncheck the full text limiter:

PsyINFO database search

Now, even though PsycINFO doesn’t include the full text for the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, we can pull up results for it (and other stand alone journals) because PsycINFO does index it.  Simply click on the link to get to the full text:

PsycINFO search results

As always, if you have questions about article searching, Ask a Librarian! 

 -Kim 

Nesting.  Nope, not the kind that birds make.  The nesting I’m talking about is used to control how the database treats your search terms when you’re building your search in a database or online.

By now you have probably heard of the Boolen Operators: AND, OR, and NOT.  These connectors are used between your keywords to tell the database how you want to combine your words and what kinds of terms should be present in your search resuts.  But what happens when you need to use different connectors (maybe a combination of ANDs and ORs) in one search box?  You need to “nest” your terms!

Nesting involves putting parantheses around like concepts to keep them together.  These parantheses are also code for the database to perform the command that’s inside of the parantheses first before adding what is outside of the parantheses, just like in math equations.  Take this search for example:

alcohol AND (adolescents OR teenagers) 

With this search the database will retrieve articles on alcohol AND adolescents or alcohol AND teenagers.  Without the parantheses the database takes your search terms literally and will search for your terms in the order you type them.  For instance, if you removed the parantheses from the bolded example above, you would find articles on alcohol and adolescents as well as articles on teenagers (without the alcohol aspect).

And sets of parantheses can be nested inside other sets of parantheses, like russian nesting dolls. 

(Alcohol OR drug OR (substance N3 abuse)) AND (teenagers OR adolescents)

Remember, the command inside the inner-most parantheses always gets processed first.

Nesting your terms comes in particularly handy when searching online in search engines like Google.  Google does recognize Boolean Operators like ANDs and ORs and will obey search commands like using parantheses in your search!  By nesting your search terms, you are better able to control how Google handles your search terms.  And when you’re searching millions upon millions of information sources, every little bit helps.   Next time you’re searching in Google, try nesting your terms and see how your search results change!

If you would like further explanation on how nesting works in the databases or online, give us a call in the library and we can walk you through how to effectively use this concept.

–Jennie

There are two ways to use the journals in your discipline:  search them for articles on a topic or browse them to see what’s in recent issues.

As learners working on assignments, you’re probably searching pretty frequently.  But do you spend any time just browsing?

Browsing is useful in many ways.  Regularly browsing recent journals in your field can:

• Inspire you with new ideas
• Illuminate where the field is heading
• Show you areas that are being ignored

Newbies in a field often don’t know what they don’t know.  Browsing can help correct that.

Experienced researchers already know a lot about their field, but browsing can help them quickly stay on top of anything new.

Want to know how to browse journals in the library?  Check out our new guide: Browsing the Contents of a Specific Journal.

- Erin

For those of you who will soon be wrapping up at the Jacksonville colloquium (or have attended any other colloquia), here are some of the guides and tutorials the librarians talked about at the library sessions.

Nearly every guide mentioned at the library’s colloquia sessions are included in a special section of our Guides & Tutorials page. To get to that section, just follow these steps.

1) From the Library Homepage click Guides & Tutorials.

2) There are several bulleted links at the top of the page that link to different sections. Click Resources for Doctoral Learners to jump to the section that includes the guides you heard about at Colloquia.

3) From here you can select a guide that piqued your interest at the colloquium!

Got questions? Ask a Librarian!

-Sommer

Many of you are fans of the Capella Library guide Bibliography Mining and Cited Reference Searching and may have seen my recent blog post titled Cited Reference Searching now in ProQuest Databases! Well cited reference searching is now a feature in the Science Direct – Social and Behavioral Sciences database (located on the Articles, Books and More page along with all the other Library databases).

Science Direct’s cited reference searching works somewhat differently than the other databases, as the “cited by” link is not on the results list but rather a button on the article information page (not the PDF).

So for example when you’re looking at a list of results in Science Direct you would click on the linked Article Title. When you’ve clicked the article title you’ll view a page similar to the below mini screen shot. The Cited By link is to the right of the article title on this page (highlighted in yellow):

Upon clicking on the Cited By link you’ll view the articles in the Science Direct database that cited the original article you were viewing.

We will update the Bibliography Mining & Cited Reference Searching guide to include ProQuest and Science Direct as soon as possible. But for now refer to this blog post and the Cited Reference Searching now in ProQuest Databases! post for guidance. Ask a Librarian if you have questions!

-Sommer

For those of you who have discovered the value of cited reference searching, you can now rejoice in knowing this feature is now available in ProQuest databases. (For those of you unfamiliar with the search techniques of bibliography mining and cited reference searching refer to this Guide.)

The following ProQuest databases now include this feature:

• ABI/INFORM Global
• Psychology Journals
• ProQuest Education Journals
• ProQuest Medical Library
• Dissertations & Theses Full Text

“Cited reference searching and bibliography mining are advanced research techniques that help you look both backwards and forwards in time to discover how an individual article or book relates to the development of a discipline. It can help you trace ideas back to their source, discover seminal works, complete a literature review, watch concepts mature over time, and analyze the importance of a single article in a discipline.” (Definition from the Bibliography Mining and Cited Reference Searching guide.)

Keep in mind that like other databases that include convenient bibliography mining and cited reference searching links, ProQuest only has links to articles and dissertations that are indexed in the ProQuest databases.

Below is a screen shot showing how the links appear in your results. Be sure to sort your results by Relevance instead of Date, as the more recently published articles are less likely to have been cited by anyone. Writing, research, and waiting for publication takes time!

-Sommer

You’re often told to write about what you know, however when you have to support what you know with resources that back up your claims it’s possible you’ll have difficulty finding them.

Just because the topic matters to you, doesn’t mean it matters to the researcher applying for grant money to conduct a research study.

A good practice is to focus on a broader topic that interests you and then use what’s in the literature to formulate your topic. See what comes up in the literature about that topic. What subtopics or aspects of the topic are being researched or discussed.

Not sure where to start? Try your textbook or other course readings to discover some of the conversations and topics being studied and discussed and mold your research question within that context.

Robin recently posted about using the Subject Thesaurus and Topics to find the right keywords for your search. You can also use these to discover ideas for how you can focus your topic. This is what we librarians refer to as “playing in the databases.” Type in a broader subject keyword and notice the subject and topic terms that come up. Then try adding one or two of those as keywords to your search to begin narrowing and defining the broader topic you started with. As you “play” you may find yourself inspired and be ready to formulate your research question or thesis statement.

One of the biggest blunders is writing your paper prior to finding the resources you need, because you might find your thesis statement is not supported in the literature. While this might be tempting and you feel you have a good enough grasp of the topic to start writing, you might end up losing a lot of time researching and rewriting your paper. So start with the research and be sure you have support for your thesis statement. If your thesis statement comes from the literature then you have the peace of mind knowing it’s supported.

Below are examples from Business Source Complete (an EBSCOhost database) and ABI/INFORM Global (a ProQuest database) showing where you can find helpful subject and topic terms after searching with broader research topic keywords.

-Sommer

Subject Terms Business Source Complete

Suggested Topics in ABI/INFORM

Many times learners call or email the Library because the search terms they are using are not giving them the results they want in the databases. We are happy to help you figure out what keywords work best, but often as librarians we consult a tool in the databases that is also available to you.

Most of the Library databases have a link to a Thesaurus (sometimes it is called Browse Topics or Subjects) which will suggest related or alternative terms to search. It’s not the first thing people think of doing when they start searching a database, but doing a little “research” on keywords at the beginning of your search may help you find those “perfect” articles sooner rather than later.

- Robin

Many of us are familiar with looking at the reference lists of articles for further articles on our topic. These articles are of course older than the article you have.

How would you like to find articles that are more recent than the article you found? To do this you want to use a technique called Cited Reference Searching.

Check out the Library’s Bibliography Mining and Cited Reference Searching  page to find out how to do this in a particular database, or using Google Scholar to find resources both inside and outside the Capella Library.

Here is an example that shows a search for a seminal article on the topic of Library Anxiety.  If you click on the cited by link in Google Scholar you will see other more recent articles and other resources that have cited this article:

Want to find out more about using the Capella Library and Google Scholar check out this brief interactive tutorial or guide or Ask-a-Librarian.

Robin