Speaker 1: Hello everybody, we are back again today with a video about academic databases. So you might very well encounter these in your time at uni if you have to write a paper and your professor asks for peer-reviewed journals or academic journals included in your bibliographies. And so you actually probably, if you didn't know it, have access to academic articles and journals and books from around the globe at your fingertips quite literally and this video is going to show you how to access them and how to find articles that best suit the paper topic that you're writing. Because if you go in and you look at it what you're going to notice and you will see in a minute is that there are all kinds of options of things that you could check the boxes for and how do I put in search terms and things like that. So what we're going to look at today is how do you most efficiently and quickly get the best articles for your paper and how do you cite them? If that's of interest stick around. So here we are in a good general database. There are various databases that are more specific, but EBSCOhost is a good general one that will have business, humanities, sciences, it will have a lot. So I like EBSCOhost and what I'd like to do is just walk through some of the choices you have here and we won't look at everything, but these will help you do searches. So here up at the start you'll just see we have our search boxes and we have optional search fields. Say we're writing a paper about great expectations. Let's look at our search fields. We can keep it general and keep it open to everything. We can also make choices like who is the author? Is it a title? Those are the two main ones that you would use and if we leave it, let's just leave it general. This is going to give us the widest amount of search results. So we're going to see here we're going to get about 1,600 almost, a little bit more. This can be great. I recommend starting here, but if you're looking to narrow it further you could limit it to, you could limit it to the title, in which case you're really going to get things that are very, very focused on great expectations specifically. Now you could have things that aren't great expectations, and they just didn't put that in the title, which is why you need to be careful. But this is a good place to start and that is when I would use that. Now if you had a certain author who wrote on that who you wanted specifically, you could then go in and put that in the next one. But now I'm going to go and open this back up and let's go and put great expectations, and you'll see there's this and here, to great expectations and Pip. So now we only want articles that reference both great expectations and Pip, and this is shooting back 33. Now I would be very careful thinking, well, I'm writing about Pip so all these other articles didn't address him. He's the main character, so he would have, but that's a place to start. Let's say I was writing a paper about Charles Dickens' work, and I was comparing great expectations and Oliver Twist. I could say, are there any articles that talk about both of those works? Looks like there are 14 sources that reference both. I could say rather than and, or in which case I'm saying I want any article that either talks about great expectations or Oliver Twist. So now you'll see we get even more back. So that, that's where these search terms come in handy, and you can add more as you go to be as narrow as you wish to be. What I'm going to do is get rid of our Oliver Twist, and let's get back to that 1600 for great expectations. Now, let's look at a bit of these things on the side. The limit to full text. This can be very helpful. What it means is that when I click on that, I'm only going to get journals that have PDF or HTML full-text documents that I can look at right now. This is especially helpful if you have procrastinated, shame on you, and you need to read it right away. My recommendation when you do this, when you read any article, whether it's online or you've brought it in, but especially when you're previewing online, is to read the abstract, which I will show you briefly in a minute, but read the intro in the first couple pages, and then go read the conclusion to get a sense of the article. That will help you to identify whether it's worth your sitting down to read the whole thing. So take some time to read that, but don't feel as though you have to read through every single article to decide if it's worthy or the right thing for your paper. So now we're limited to this. It's helpful, but when you do this, you really are kicking out a lot of really quality articles. There are a lot of great articles that just aren't available on PDF full-text, and it's a shame to not look at them because they are pretty easily accessible for most university students. Many libraries have a department that's called Interlibrary Loan, and the lovely people who work there, it's their job to help you get the resources you need. So you often go in through an online portal in your school's library, and you just put in the information about the article you want, but that you don't have access to the full-text stuff, and they actually go and get it for you, and then they'll email it to you. So it's quite easy to have access to it. Interlibrary Loan can bring in books and articles and other kinds of media from libraries all over the world for you, so don't be limited to what's in your library, or don't be limited just by what is here. But this is helpful if you are on a time crunch. Scholarly or peer-reviewed journals. Very often, a teacher will tell you you need to have scholarly sources cited. What that means is that the articles that you have as a peer-reviewed article, those are, they've been written by an academic of record, a respected academic, and then the article was shared with peers who would have been experts in that field. They would have reviewed the article, commented on it, critiqued it, challenged the author, given it back. Based on that, the author then would have gone through and made a lot of edits, then submitted it to a journal, and then the academic journal would publish it. So it's been heavily vetted. That's what that means. Very often, professors will want that, and this is very helpful to check that box so that it's just winnowing out anything that does not fit that bill. In terms of dates of publication. For something like Great Expectations, I would probably want to keep it open and say, well, yes, I mean, Charles Dickens passed away a very long time ago, so something written in 1940 might still be quite interesting to me. If you're doing something scientific, if you're doing something that's technological, you might not want something that dated. You might want something that's only 40 years old, or maybe you are writing about the perspective of politics and academics in the 1960s, in which case you would use these academic journals more as a primary source. And if you are not clear on the differences between primary and secondary sources, I did a video on this, which I will link below, as well as hopefully in this video, but that is where you might just choose to limit that to the 1960s, so you can play with the dates. The last thing I want to focus on on this page is this bit here. So, these reviews are pulling a lot back. You'll see that some are magazines, some are academic journals, some are newspapers, but then there's this big bit here that's book reviews. If you're writing a scholarly paper, the book reviews really probably are not what you're looking for in terms of things you will want to cite. That being said, I have this other bit of advice that really is not germane to this topic of the video, but is enormously helpful. If you are assigned a book, this is particularly true of scholarly books, not scholarly books, if you are assigned a book, this is particularly true of theoretical books, and they're very confusing to you, go into a general search database like this and search and see if you can't find just some book reviews on it, because oftentimes those book reviews will summarize the topics and give a context to it that is enormously helpful for you. So, if you're in one of those psychology classes, or if you're in a philosophy class, or if you're in any sort of a highly theoretical course, using the book review feature in a database is enormously helpful. Just a side bit. But you could say, well, I don't want those, I only want my academic journals, in which case you can really winnow it that way. So, that's a good general overview of a database. Every database looks a little bit different, but EBSCOhost is pretty comprehensive in terms of the offerings of here on the left-hand side of how you can limit it, so I'd like to show you that one. Now, what I'd like to do is just, let's see what happens when we click on one of these. So, what happens is we get a bunch of citation information and we get an abstract. The abstract will really help tell you, is that an article that I'm interested in or not, and the other thing that I really want to point out here is this happy button right here that reads cite. It used to be, of course, that you had to know all of your MLA, all of your APA, all of your Chicago citation practices, and sit down and manually go through them. But now, with the magic of technology, if I click on that cite button, it's already done that for me, so that I can go in and just say, well, I want MLA for this article, and then I can copy that and I can use it in my bibliography. Another trick, as you're collecting your articles for your paper, make a folder on your computer and in it drop all of the full text articles. Try to get the full text for every single article. You do not know when you will want it again. I cannot tell you how many times you will think, I'm done with this, I don't need it anymore, and then you will be sorry that you did not keep it. So, save the full text of the article, and when you do that, if you right-click on the file, it usually offers you a place that you can add a little bit of information about the document, about the file. There's just a bit where you can sort of type anything you want. That is a great place to also paste citation information. That way, it will always be attached to the article, and anytime you need it, you have it. So, that's just a recommendation for you. So, if we click on one that has a PDF full text, you'll see here on the left-hand side, PDF full text. And look at that magic. It's right there in front of us for us to read. We can print this and just have a fun time reading. So, those are basic bits of how you would use a database. So, those are just some bits on how you'd use a database. Another general database you could have is a database. So, what you could do is you could make a database. You could make a database of your own. You could make a database of your own. You could make a database of your own. So those are just some bits on how you'd use a database. Another general database that I think is really pretty great is called JSTOR. J-S-T-O-R. And this is what it looks like. You can go to the advanced search and you'll see that it looks very similar in some ways to the EBSCO host one. It's a bit more limited in what in the ways in which you can refine it. But JSTOR is really great. It just has a lot of different things and you can see down here all the different disciplines that it covers. So why would you click on one of these rather than just do a big massive general search? Clicking on these is just going to help you further specify if you know specifically what you're writing about. It's just going to help winnow out a lot of the results you get so that what you have is more narrow and perhaps more germane to you. There's also a great deal of benefit to be had to searching broadly because say I'm doing an article on British studies and they have seven journals for British studies. Say I'm doing that. So say I search say I have this article on British studies of some sort that I want to do. There actually might be this really interesting article that is somehow aquatic sciences but actually does have to do with British studies. And that can really enhance your paper. It can make it more in-depth. So there's a benefit to narrowing but there's also quite a benefit to keeping it broad. So there you have it. I hope that was helpful. Thank you for watching. Think about subscribing and I wish you so much luck with your papers because I have a feeling you've got a paper due or you wouldn't be watching this. So best of luck with it. Sorry for the lighting changes. It's a partly cloudy day again and if you're a subscriber of this channel you know that part of the course. And so otherwise I hope you're having a beautiful day. I will see you very soon. Bye.