LibGuides: PHI2010 Library Lessons: 2: Preparing for Research

Choose Appropriate Keywords for Your Topic

When using library resources, it's usually best to pick out the main concepts of your topic and search by using these keywords, instead of a sentence or question. Consider which parts of your topic are essential, and use those.

The main keywords for the following research questions are bolded and in purple:

Do plastic shopping bags contribute to ocean pollution?
Is global warming a threat to polar bears?
Should contraception be made available in high schools?

You can combine these keywords with the word AND:

plastic shopping bags AND ocean pollution
global warming AND polar bears
contraception AND high schools

One search term that is good to add to a topic is ethics. You may combine this with another topic with the word AND:

capital punishment AND ethics
genetic testing AND ethics
dog racing AND ethics

Phrase Searching and Truncation

Phrase Searching

To find an exact phrase (i.e., words in a row in an exact order), enclose the phrase in quotation marks.

"food deserts"
"gun control"
"sanctuary cities"

Truncation

Truncation (shortening your keyword) makes the search engine look at other possible forms of a word for which you are searching. Use truncation to find plurals and variations on the endings of a word. To truncate, use the asterisk symbol *. You can enter this symbol by hitting Shift and 8 on the keyboard at the same time or by hitting the asterisk symbol on the number pad.

Logic*: searches logic, logics, logical
Bioethic*: searches bioethic, bioethics, bioethical

Test Yourself!

What would you type into a search tool if you wanted to locate any of the following words: nurse, nurses, nursing?

nurs*

Look for Synonyms

When considering your search terms, be sure to consider if there are synonyms or other ways to express your topic, such as spelling variations or related terms. You can combine these synonyms using the word OR. This tells the search engine to include both possible options in the search results.

"global warming" OR "climate change"
"death penalty" OR "capital punishment"
children OR teenagers

Keep Track of Your Sources

As you locate information for your assignment, be sure to keep track of where the information came from. Remember, for every piece of outside information you use, you must cite it. You will need to provide full citation at the end of your paper (in a bibliography or Works Cited list), and then in-text citations within your paper itself, which will direct your reader to the full citation and help them locate the source you used.

All direct quotes, paraphrasing, summarizing, statistics, and outside opinions count as outside information, and must be cited. If you have never developed a system for keeping track of your citations, the following video provides an easy to use but effective system.

Hi, everyone! This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll tell you how I use Google Sheets to organize my citations and sources for papers and research projects.

I'm in my first year of graduate school and we do a lot of writing. References and citations are very important, as they are for any discipline. I supposed if I was writing a dissertation with a hundred citations, I would feel the need to pay for and learn a whole complicated citation software, but since I'm not, I prefer to use tools that I already use and know well. AND despite the fact I'm not writing a dissertation, I have written some papers that have had over 25 sources, so I do need SOME kind of system to organize and manage my citations.

I started out, as most people do, with kind of a hodge-podge system of just cutting and pasting URLs from the Internet and sticking them at the bottom of the Word document of the paper. Or, if I'm doing research, I'd just copy and paste URLs with maybe some quotes from the study or article. The problem was, if I had multiple quotes, I couldn't organize them by topic for fear of losing the reference link, or I'd have to duplicate the URL multiple times. Plus, scrolling down to check these references was annoying. I needed a better, less messy system.

Here's what I do now. For each research project or paper, I create a new Google Sheets spreadsheet for references. You could easily do this in any spreadsheet program. I name it something like Class name - Project name - Citations and Quotes. Let's use a research project that I just did for my Policy class as an example. My spreadsheet name is "Policy - Ex-Felon Voting Rights Citations and Quotes." Then -- I make 2 tabs. The first tab is called Quotes, the second is Sources. I'm going to put a sample of this Citation Spreadsheet up on my Google Drive to share with you. To use it, just follow the link that I will provide in the notes section, make a copy into your own Drive, and then use it or modify it as you see fit.

Sample Google Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PaQbDLrTFptlZAlarTkdj_syYBxs1zUaqqXulF1e11A/edit?usp=sharing

Back to the spreadsheet -- so, now as I'm doing my research and reading a bunch of different articles -- in this case, mostly news articles and opinion pieces -- I starting finding quotes or statistics that help me to understand the issue or that I might want to use in my paper. So, I copy the quote and paste it into this first column. Okay -- the second column is a reference number. I'm going to want to remember where I got this quote from -- so go to the article and copy the URL or website address. I note some basics about the source and what the article is about -- in this case it's an Editorial from The Washington Post Editorial Board. Now I go into the Sources tab paste the URL under website address, note some basics about the article -- more for my own recall ability than anything else, and I number it -- #1. Now, I'm going to have a bunch of other articles to put in here, so I might as well go ahead and fill in these numbers, 1 to 10. Okay, back to the Quotes tab, I'm going to indicate that this quote came from article #1. Now, I can paste several quotes from the same article, I just need to indicate where they came from. So, here is my completed spreadsheet for this research project. I have 13 sources and 38 quotes. I obviously did not use all of those in my paper, but they helped to shape my understanding of the topic and served as a repository for the quotes and statistics that I DID end up using.

Just a quick note -- because of the nature of this research project, most of my sources were articles about current events, but this system also works great for scholarly research since so much is accessible on the Internet these days through your academic institution's research portal. I also use this system to capture quotes from books. Check out my video on exporting quotes from Kindle books into a spreadsheet such as this.

There are two things that I find really helpful about this system:

1) Easy to categorize - Because each quote has its own line, you can tag each quote with a theme or category. For example, in this column, I'm going to put in the main reasoning that states use to disenfranchise ex-offenders. There are a handful: safety, punishment, violation of social contract, political ideology, race etc. Not every quote is going to get a tag, but I can tag all of the ones that apply and then I can sort by this column. That way, if this is how I've decided to structure my paper, in this case -- by state rationale, I have quotes that are all nicely grouped together and ready to use for each topic. The second thing, is that this system makes it

2) Easy to cite while drafting - So, I'm writing my paper and I want to use a good statistic. Here's one: "McAuliffe's order affected 200,000 people in a state where 3.9 million people voted in the 2012 presidential election." So, I go ahead and quote this in my paper. Now, I don't want to slow down my writing process do the whole citation now (for me, that is an entirely different thinking process), so when I'm drafting, I just put the reference number in parenthesis right behind the quote. Like this (4). Then, once I've drafted and edited the paper, I go back in looking for reference numbers and replace them with proper citations. This is easy to do since I have a nice centralized place where I've gathered all of the source website information.

This system has worked well for me. Let me know what you think! Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!

Test Yourself!

Do you need to cite outside information if you paraphrase it and put it in your own words?

YES. All outside information must be cited, even if you are not using it word-for-word. The ideas and information did not come from you, so you must include an in-text citation and a full citation in your bibliography.