Learning New Information: Effective Research

Today we had a group meeting, in which our college librarian, Diana, showed us some different websites and tricks into optimising our research, all by what we type into different search engines. As a result of this, I decided to try it out.

1) InfoTrac

Infotrac, one of many information/article websites, allows you to search for news articles that may be relevant to your research. By using the advanced search, you are able to narrow down the articles to find what you want.

Infotrac is a collection of many news articles from a variety of newspapers. By using the advanced search, typing in key words and phrases that are relevant to the research, you can find articles relating or including the information you hope to find.





The main result being an array of articles on the screen. Even though for my results there are many articles that aren't relevant, by looking through the list I can hopefully find something, even if small, to help me with my project.



2) JSTOR

 Similar to Infotrac, JSTOR is a website that allows you to access articles, books and journals on a chosen topic. It also has an advanced search feature to get specific information.






With JSTOR, you can also choose a specific language, as well as the option to refine the type of text you find, as well as being able to choose a subject eg psychology.




After doing multiple attempts at an advanced search, I found some very useful articles about my topic, even if it did take me some scanning and reading.






3) Google (Advanced Search // Scholar)

We were then told how to use google the right way. Firstly using the advanced search instead of normal search, as it means we can narrow the results down from 100's of millions to a few thousand.
You can also select words you don't want in your search, which I personally found very helpful as music/art related results would come up otherwise.



Personally, I found google (advanced search) very helpful, as it got me many more results than both JSTOR and infotrac, results of which were also more specific to my topic.

As well as this, we were reminded of Google Scholar, where you can find research papers on your chosen topic. However, you can only freely access the ones with HTML/PDF's on the side which does limit your availability, however I still found a good range of material, including ones for specific sports which I may want to talk about in my report.