The following steps will provide you with an overview of how to conduct research on the SCCC library website.
If you prefer to learn by watching a video, this College Seminar Library Orientation video by SCCC librarian Jennifer Farquhar offers a careful, detailed introduction that many students find useful, especially the information she shares about
- Finding peer-reviewed academic journal articles and newspaper articles
- Easy, copy-and-paste formatting method for creating a Works Cited entry for each source
- Accessing program-specific guides, e.g., the "one stop shop" lists of resources for nearly every major we offer
- The streaming video and feature films section
- Using the One Search feature on the library homepage.
KEYWORDS
- Intro to OneSearch on SCCC library website
- How to use key words
It's important to have a bit of practice doing keyword searches in OneSearch. Let's say you're interested in conducting research on how involvement in extracurricular activities can have a positive impact on your college experience in general or on your academic performance in particular. You could use a variety of terms in the search boxes, such as college + extracurricular involvement, or student life + extracurricular activities, or academic performance + extracurricular involvement.
DATABASES
While OneSearch is a useful feature in the SCCC Library website, at times it may not help generate the types of research you're looking for. For more control over your searches, I recommend clicking the Articles and Databases link at the right side of the SCCC Library homepage, under Research Links. Or you can go to this direct link:
Here you'll see three large, multi-subject databases: EBSCO, Academic Search Complete, and Academic OneFile. These can often generate useful matches for your search terms. Unlike when searching Google, you want to use more general search terms to begin with.
You'll also find at the top of this page that there's a drop-down menu of subject databases. I personally find these very useful. For example:
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- If doing research for my HUM116: Gender and the Humanities class, my students and I tend to find the databases in Psychology/Sociology as well as the Law databases quite useful in locating research.
- In my literature classes, the Literature, Humanities, and History subject databases are indispensable.
- In my writing courses, the subject databases for Long Island and Current Issues tend to find appropriate research sources as well.
- For all of these courses, my students and I find the Newspapers tab handy too, especially for when you locate a great article online but it's hidden behind an annoying paywall.
- For COL101, click the Reference tab at the top and you'll find the Occupational Outlook Handbook, where you can look up all sorts of great information about various occupations in the U.S., including salary statistics, growth rate estimates, required training or degrees, etc. The Education databases are incredibly useful too.
For your homework for this module, you will read several pages about how to locate accurate, reliable information sources, and then you'll post some practice research to the discussion board.