Library & Archives

• Books are extremely valuable resources when doing in-depth research on a topic! Authors have hundreds of pages to give detailed explanations and background information surrounding the various facets of your research interest.
• Using this kind of in-depth information will make it easier to form a research question or thesis statement (or even spark your inspiration)
• The bibliographies found in books are extensive, and will point you to other resources to add to your own resource list.
• Remember: scholars write journal articles under the assumption that you already have a relatively thorough understanding of the topic – this means that you will likely not find the foundational information needed for your topic in the beginning stages of your research process. In this sense, books become indispensable

The catalogue is your primary tool for finding books in the J.N. Desmarais Library. You can also use the catalogue to find other materials, including government publications and journals (including individual articles).

You can search the catalogue by:

• Title
• Author/Creator
• Subject
• Call Number

When you know the book you are searching for, pick Title or Author; when you are searching for a topic, start with Keyword unless you know the exact Subject heading describing your topic.

More on searching the Catalogue is available in Module 5 of the Research Skills Tutorial in D2L.

The databases to the right provide references to many scholarly journal articles and papers.

1. Start off with keyword searches expressing your topic. Keyword searching crosses all fields.
2. Use Search Operators such as "OR" and "AND" to expand or reduce your results.
3. Review those items that look relevant, then, exploit the details within those entries to help lead you to other relevant articles.
   • Pay attention to the subject headings (often called "descriptors") to see how the database describes your topic and use them to find related articles.
   • Find other papers written by the same author; these will typically be on similar subjects.
   • Follow citation trails: other articles that have cited this article will probably be on a related subject and will include citations to other articles of interest.
4. For more Secrets of Searching a Database, review that section in How to Research Like a Librarian.

Peer Review is the evaluation of creative work by scholars in the same field in order to maintain or enhance the quality of the work in that field.

In the case of peer reviewed journals, which are usually academic, peer review generally refers to the evaluation of the articles in them prior to publication. For more, check out this definition of peer review.

• To ascertain whether a journal is peer reviewed, consult Ulrichsweb.