Speaker 1: Hi there, in this video we're going to be talking about how to conduct research using the library databases, so let's get right to it. All universities have some kind of access to library databases, and normally you can find the library link from the main website for your university. For West Coast University students, you're going to click on Academics, and then University Library. Once we're on the library site, there are tons of different links and tools that you can explore, but the primary one that's going to be useful for our database search is the A to Z database list. Once we're in here, we have a couple of options. We can search by database, or we can search by platform. Platforms simply host different databases. I personally like to search by database. So if we scroll down here, we see alphabetically, A to Z, all of the databases that the university subscribes to, and then underneath each link is a short description of what types of journals are housed in that database. So you may have ones that are particular to specific fields, and you may have ones that are multidisciplinary. So for instance, this first one called Academic Search Complete says, Academic Search Complete is the world's most valuable and comprehensive scholarly multidisciplinary full text database. So as you can see, this is one of the multidisciplinary ones. So I always like to begin with Academic Search Complete, and most universities tend to have access to this particular database, because no matter what you're looking for, you're probably going to find something there. So let's go ahead and click that one open. Now at this point, you'll be required to enter your ID information. If you do not know your library ID and password, you should have received it via email from the library when you enrolled. If you cannot find that email, then you can simply contact the librarian who can help you with that information. Once you've entered your info, you're ready to begin your search. However, there are a few things that we should do before we actually start. So if we look up here, we can see that right now this is searching the database that I clicked on, Academic Search Complete. However, we can click here on Choose Databases, and we'll be presented with the same list that we saw previously. So right now it's just looking in Academic Search Complete, but I can go ahead and add all of the other databases that I think might be useful for my topic. The descriptions are still available. If you hover over these little comment bubbles here, you have all of the information you need. You can start reading through them and deciding which ones might be useful. Let's pretend just for the sake of the search that all of these here are going to be good sources for us. That'll do. Let's say that these are the ones we're most likely to get good information from for our topic. We hit OK, and now it takes you to this general search, which is not where you want to be. No basic searches for us. Let's go back to our advanced search. Here we are again, but this time you can see that it's searching Academic Search Complete, and if you click Show All, it's now searching all of the other databases that you clicked on as well. If we scroll down a little bit, we'll find that we can limit our search to make sure that we only get full text. In other words, it's only going to show you articles that you actually have access to, not articles where you only can access the abstract. And then we definitely want to check on peer review. So this ensures that the only articles we get when we search are our scholarly academic peer reviewed articles. You can also here limit the time period if you want to make sure that your articles are more recent, for example. But let's leave it like that for now, and let's start playing with our search. Unlike Google, you're not going to ask a question. You're going to play with your search terms and start kind of using some trial and error. Let's say that we're writing a paper that has to do with obesity. If I were to type the word obesity here, notice that I get multiple options. Obviously, I could just search the word obesity, but look here at these options, obesity or overweight or fat or obese or unhealthy weight or high BMI. So what's going on here? Basically, these are all synonyms of the word obesity. And so the reason you might want to choose that option is because you otherwise might be missing out on articles that are using the term overweight instead of obesity. And those may also have been useful articles for you. So let's go ahead and click search, see what happens. So if we look here, we've got 238,000 or so articles. That's a lot. We probably want to narrow down the search a little bit. So you have these ends, which means that if I add something else here, when I search, it's only going to give me articles that say both one of these plus the new thing that I've added. So let's say for instance, that my paper is going to focus on childhood obesity. So let me type child. We get more options, children or adolescents or youth or child or teenager. We also get down here, children or kids or youth or child. I think I'd prefer this one because perhaps my paper focuses just on young children, not necessarily adolescents. So let's try that one and click search. Okay, so now we have 42,000 articles that went down significantly. It's probably still a bit too much. Let's try to add something else. Perhaps I am exploring the epidemic of childhood obesity in the US. So I might want to type United States. Now of course it could be United States or America or USA or US. So let's try that one. Okay, now we're down to 9,388. That's good. Still a bit too many. We can always add more ends by just clicking the plus. In this case, let's just go with what we have for now. But by the way, if you scroll down here, you can still limit your publication date. So let's say that I've decided that I want no articles older than 2015. Move that over and now I'm down to 3,500 or so. Now one other way that you could limit your search further is to play with these. So select a field. Right now there's nothing selected, which means that any article that says any of these words plus any of these words and any of these words anywhere in the article is going to show up. However, if I switch this to title, that means that one of these words has to show up in the title of the article in order for it to appear, meaning that the issue of obesity is going to be one of the main topics of the article since it's in the title. So let's hit search. Now we've got 1,200. But if we wanted to say children or kids or youth or child also in the title, try that 452. So that's getting significantly better, right? We can also try putting this one in the title, but let's leave it at this for now. Now we can start exploring our articles. We start by just reading the titles because the title itself will give you an idea of whether or not this might be a useful source for your paper. So if the title looks promising, then what do we do? Let's say for instance that this one, physical activity, sedentary behavior, fruit and vegetable consumption and access. What influences obesity in rural children? That one sounds interesting to me, might be good for my paper. So I'm going to go ahead and open the PDF. So you have multiple links. Sometimes you have an HTML as well. Whenever it has a PDF, which it normally does, that's the best to open because it's going to look exactly the way that it looks within the journal. I like to right click and open it in a new tab just so that I can keep coming back to this as I continue my search. So here we are with our article. If you scroll down, you've got the abstract. This is the only thing you're reading for right now because when you read the abstract, that will tell you whether or not this truly is a useful source. If that's the case, you don't have to jump into reading the whole article right now. You can just kind of set it aside, come back here and continue your search. So let's say that you've decided this is one of the articles you want for your paper. What do you do? The best thing you can do so that you don't lose it and have to refind it is to email yourself the PDF of this article. And how do you do that? On the right hand side here, this little envelope icon is email. So we're going to click there and then you simply type whatever email address you'd like to have it sent to here. Type a subject heading, make sure that the PDF is checked off. And then when you send yourself that, you will get the PDF that you can download and then save somewhere on your computer. Now before doing that, here's another tip. You want to click on citation format and then in the dropdown, choose whichever documentation style is required for your paper. So let's say it's APA, going to click on APA and then you're going to hit send. So now you're going to get the PDF that you can download. And in addition to that, in the text of your email, you're going to get the APA reference for this article that you can basically copy and paste into your references page. So as you've probably gathered, the research process takes time. You're going to be sifting through tons of articles from Google, Google Scholar, and from your library databases. So make sure to give yourself that time. If you begin the research process when it's already time to start writing your paper, it's going to be very stressful for you and probably unsuccessful. Whereas if you start the research process much earlier, then you are not yet stressed at all about the actual writing of the paper. And you can focus on just exploring information. Actually the part of the writing process that should normally take the longest is the research component. So it should feel like getting lost on YouTube, clicking on one cute puppy video after another. So you find one interesting article and that sparks your curiosity, gives you an idea for another search term you might use to try to find new information. That is what it should feel like and it won't be able to happen properly if you don't have enough time for that process. So as they say, not all those who wander are lost. So please go wander. Learn something new. It's good for you. Learn something new. It's good for you.