Researching an Article     Part 1

Introduction to Research

Searching for information today is both easier and harder than it was when your only choice was the library and its massive card catalog. More information is available than ever before, and you can access information from across the country or around the world. But finding what you want requires more skill on the part of the researcher, mainly because the human intermediaries – the reference librarian and the skilled cataloguer/indexer – are largely absent from cyberspace.

This means that you, the researcher, need to understand where information is most likely to be found, how it's organized and how to retrieve it effectively using computerized search tools. The reference librarian is an invaluable resource to help teach you and advise you, but won't be there when you're searching Yahoo at midnight on the weekend before your article must be handed in.

This rearch section will help you to learn how to become a skilled researcher, both in the library and in cyberspace.

Learning to research in the library

Get to know your library

The resources available to you will vary a lot depending on whether you're using an academic library at a large university, a public library in a large (or small) community, or a high school library. Find out early in your research project what resources your library has, by visiting and taking a tour, if possible. Some college libraries offer an online tour of the library or a self-guided tour using handouts in addition to tours guided by librarians.

Many people who use libraries don't make full use of the reference collection except for the encyclopedias, while reference librarians have spent large amounts of money and time in developing wonderful reference collections for research. See Reference Sources in Libraries to see a small sample of the kind of information may be hiding in your library's reference room.

Libraries build their collections based on what they think their patrons will need, so the collections of reference materials, fiction and non-fiction will differ between a public and an academic library. Be aware of what kind of collection you're working with, and make arrangements to visit a different library if necessary.

Learn to browse

Understand the classification scheme in your library

A library's classification scheme is a system by which books are organized to be placed on the shelves. Browsing the shelves is an important step when you're trying to get ideas for your research project, so it's worth the effort to become familiar with your library's system.

Most libraries in the U.S. use either the Dewey Decimal system or Library of Congress system, while Britain uses the UDC and other countries use various systems. All of the systems attempt to "co-locate" books with similar subject matter. In a smaller library, many times you can bypass the catalog as a starting point and go directly to the shelves for a first look at your topic, so long as you have a chart of the classification scheme as a guide.

Remember, though, that a book can have only one location in a library. Some books cover more than one subject and the cataloguer has to choose one place to locate the book. Also, non-book materials such as videos and films, will be located in a different section of the building and could be missed by simply shelf-browsing the book collection.

See our charts summarizing the Dewey Decimal Classification System and the Library of Congress Classification System.

Learn how online library catalogs work

A library catalog is a listing of all the items held by a particular library. A cataloguer examines the item (book, video, map, audio tape, CD, etc.) and decides how it will be described in the library's catalog and under what subject it will be classified. When the item is entered into the library's online catalog database, information is entered into different fields, which are then searchable by users.

Library catalogs usually treat a book as a single "item" and catalog it that way, even if it might be a book of poetry or a book of essays by different authors. You can't find a reference to a particular poem in the library catalog, nor to a particular essay within a book of essays. The same is true of magazines, journals and newspapers. The library catalog will tell you if the library keeps a particular periodical in its collection, but will not list all the articles within the periodical, nor will it necessarily even list all the issues of the periodical which are kept. There are other publications in the reference room which will help you retrieve these individual items, but usually not the library catalog (see Reference Sources in Libraries for examples, as well as the Find out how to search for journals and newspapers section below)

Most catalogs are searchable by author, title, subject and keyword. Some of the important things you need to know about the information in those fields is discussed below. An excellent tutorial for using a typical academic library catalog system can be found at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside Library. It's intended for their students, so has some references to entering "fill in numbers" from an answer booklet. Just ignore that part and work through the tutorial, which is Unit 2-Using the Library Catalog (http://www.uwp.edu/library/unit2/) of the library's "Information Skills and Literacy Workbook." The entire series of Parkside's tutorial units and another outstanding tutorial from the Houston Community College System are linked at Library Tutorials.

Searching the catalog by subject and keyword

The subject field of a catalog record contains only the words or phrases used by the cataloguer when assigning a subject heading. If the library is using Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), for example, the subject heading for a book about how playing football affects the players' bodies would probably be assigned the subject heading "Football--physiological aspects." Unless you type in that entire phrase as your search term, you won't find the book by searching the subject field.

Subject field searching can be very helpful, but you must find out how the subject you're looking for is worded by using the subject manuals or getting help from the reference librarian. Once you zero in on an appropriate subject heading, a search in the catalog will give you a list of all the items in the library's collection categorized under that heading, so you can browse the collection online. Note also that most items are classified under one or two very specific subject headings, rather than under many subjects.

The keyword field of a library catalog generally searches several fields in the database record--the author, title, and description fields. The description is any information about the catalogued item which may have been entered by the cataloguer. This is not the full text of the book, nor is it an abstract (summary) of the book but rather a short paragraph containing information the cataloguer thought would be helpful to a user. This is not like searching for keywords in an indexed database like Alta Vista on the internet, where every word in a document has been recorded.

For this reason, keyword searching alone could miss an item pertinent to your research project if the keyword you use was not included in the short paragraph written by the cataloguer. It's best to use a combination of keyword searching and subject-field searching to make a comprehensive search of the library catalog.

Searching other libraries' catalogs

There are lots of library catalogs on the internet--but so what? You can search the catalog of a library in Timbuktu, but that doesn't get you the book. Remember that library catalogs do not have full text of books and documents but are just a database with descriptions of the library's holdings. There are a few, and will be more, actual online libraries where you can go to read or search full text documents. Just don't confuse these special resources with a library catalog, which is very different. See Reference Sources on the Web for links to online books.

Find out how to search for journals and newspapers at your library

Most libraries have either print, CD-ROM, or online (either in the library or sometimes on the Web) indexes of magazine, journal and newspaper articles (referred to as periodicals) available for users. Some of these are abstracts of the articles, which are short summaries written to describe the article's contents in enough detail so that a reader can decide whether or not to seek out the full text. Some of these sources may be in the form of full text, where the entire articles have been entered into the database.

The databases will include particular periodicals published within a span of time (for example, a popular newspaper index goes back 36 months for certain major newspapers). Know what the database you're searching contains and whether it's represented as abstract or full text. Get some pointers from the reference librarian about how to search that particular database, and build on what you've learned about search syntax and search techniques from Skills for Online Searching.

Note that these resources, whether print or digital, contain information about periodicals which may not be held by your library. If the database does not have full text articles, you may find an article right on point to your topic, but that particular newspaper or journal may not be in your library's collection. There are ways to get these articles, the fastest ways involving paying a fee to a company in the business of providing articles to researchers! Check out your options with the reference desk if you need an article that's not in your library's collection.

Bibliography surfing

Web surfing is finding an interesting Web page and then using the hyperlinks on that page to jump to other pages. If you find the first page interesting, chances are you’ll also be interested in the pages the author has chosen to link to.

Librarians and researchers have been doing this for a long time, in the print medium. It’s a valuable tool for identifying sources on your chosen topic.

What you do is use the bibliography provided at the end of an encyclopedia article, journal article or book that you’ve found particularly pertinent to your topic and follow the bibliographic references much as you would hyperlinks on the Web. Since you’re locating items which influenced the author of the original article and to which he or she referred, they’re likely to be "on point" to your topic. Then use the bibliography at the end of those cited articles to find even more items, and so on.

Consult the reference librarian for advice

Several times above, you've been advised to consult the reference librarian. Reference librarians can help save you a lot of time because they know their library's collection very well--both the reference collection and the nonfiction collection--and can often tell you "off the top of their heads" whether or not the library has a particular item you're looking for. They are also skilled searchers, both of the library's catalog and of online resources such as CD-ROM, online databases and the internet. In addition, they're trained in teaching others to use these resources and are glad to do so.

Learn about search syntax and professional search techniques

To be successful at any kind of online searching, you need to know something about how computer searching works. At this time, much of the burden is on the user to intelligently construct a search strategy, taking into account the peculiarities of the particular database and search software. The section on Skills for online searching will get you started.

Learning to research on the web

Cyberspace is not like your library

Librarians have a weird sense of humour. This is now an old joke: The internet is like a library with no catalog where all the books get up and move themselves every night...This was the state of the internet up until 1995 or thereabouts. Finding anything on the internet required comic strip characters like Archie, Veronica and Jughead, and generally you were the one who ended up feeling like a jughead when you rooted around for hours and still came up dry.

The new joke is: The internet is like a library with a thousand catalogs, none of which contains all the books and all of which classify the books in different categories--and the books still move around every night. The problem now is not that of "finding anything" but finding a particular thing When your search term in one of the popular search engines brings back 130,000 hits, you still wonder if the one thing you're looking for will be among them.

This can be an enormous problem when you're trying to do serious research on the internet. Too much information is almost worse than too little, because it takes so much time to sort through it to see if there's anything useful. The rest of this section will give you some pointers to help you become an effective internet researcher.

Get to know the reference sources on the internet

Finding reference material on the Web can be a lot more difficult than walking into the Reference Room in your local library.

The subject-classified Web directories described below will provide you with your main source of links to reference materials on the Web. In addition, many public and academic libraries, like the Internet Public Library, have put together lists of links to Web sites, categorized by subject. The difficulty is finding Web sites that contain the same kind of substantive content you'd find in a library. See the section on Reference Sources on the Web for a list of some Web-based reference materials, but please read Information found--and not found--on the Web to understand why it's different from using the library.

Understand how search engines work

Search engines are software tools that allow a user to ask for a list of Web pages containing certain words or phrases from an automated search index. The automated search index is a database containing some or all of the words appearing on the Web pages that have been indexed. The search engines send out a software program known as a spider, crawler or robot. The spider follows hyperlinks from page to page around the Web, gathering and bringing information back to the search engine to be indexed.

Most search engines index all the text found on a Web page, except for words too common to index, such as "a, and, in, to, the" and so on. When a user submits a query, the search engine looks for Web pages containing the words, combinations, or phrases asked for by the user. Engines may be programmed to look for an exact match or a close match (for example, the plural of the word submitted by the user). They may rank the hits as to how close the match is to the words submitted by the user.

One important thing to remember about search engines is this: once the engine and the spider have been programmed, the process is totally automated. No human being examines the information returned by the spider to see what subject it might be about or whether the words on the Web page adequately reflect the actual main point of the page.

Another important fact is that all the search engines are different. They each index differently and treat users' queries differently (how nice!). The burden is on the searcher to learn how to use the features of each search engine. See the links to Search Engines and to sources which have done Evaluations of the various features of Web directories and search engines.

Read an excellent article about search engines:

Searching the Internet Part I: Some Basic Considerations and Automated Search Indexesin InterNIC News, September 1996, by Jack Solock(Solock 1996 A)
http://rs.internic.net/nic-support/nicnews/archive/september96/enduser.html

Also see the Web and internet tutorials in the Links section for additional online articles.

Know the difference between a search engine and a directory

A search engine lets you seek out specific words and phrases in Web pages. A directory is more like a subject catalog in the library--a human being has determined the main point of a Web page and has categorized it based on a classification scheme of topics and subtopics used by that directory. Many of the search engines have also developed browsable subject catalogues, and most of the directories also have a search engine, so the distinction between them is blurring.

Jack Solock, Special Librarian at InterNIC Net Scout, classifies Web directories into categories based on the amount of human intervention. The categories he uses are subject catalogs, annotated directories and subject guides.

A subject catalogclassifies Web pages into subject categories and uses excerpts from the Web page as a short description. An annotated directory divides sites by subject but also contains analysis of the site by an editor, librarian or subject specialist, who writes a description to assist the user. A subject guide attempts to provide a selection of sites relating to a particular subject which represent high quality resources, thus representing the highest level of human intervention of the three types because it involves building a collection of sites to represent a subject area.

Mr. Solock categorizes the following resources:

• Yahoo, BUBL and Galaxy as subject catalogs,
• Magellan, Lycos Top 5%, and InterNIC Directory of Directories as annotated directories and
• Argus Clearinghouse and the WWW Virtual Library as subject guides.

Read his article, "Searching the Internet Part II: Subject Catalogs, Annotated Directories, and Subject Guides" at http://rs.internic.net/nic-support/nicnews/oct96/enduser.html for more good information about directories (Solock 1996 B).

See the links to Web directories and to sources which have done Evaluations of the various features of Web directories and search engines.

Consult the reference librarian for advice

Reference librarians can often be of great help in planning your internet research. Just as they know their library's collection, they probably have done a lot of research on the internet and know its resources pretty well. They're also skilled at constructing search terms and using search engines, and they're trained to teach others how to search.

Learn about search syntax and professional search techniques

To be successful at any kind of online searching, you need to know something about how computer searching works. At this time, much of the burden is on the user to intelligently construct a search strategy, taking into account the peculiarities of the particular database and search software. The section on Skills for online searching will help.

Learn some essential browser skills

Know how to use your browser for finding your way around, finding your way back to places you've been before and for "note-taking" as you gather information for your paper. A large part of effective research on the Web is figuring out how to stay on track and not waste time--the "browsing" and "surfing" metaphors are fine for leisure time spent on the Web, but not when you're under time pressure to finish your research paper. Lots of colleges have Netscape tutorials - see Web and internet tutorials for links which will supplement the information below.

URLs

Understand the construction of a URL. Sometimes a hyperlink will take you to a URL such as http://www.sampleurl.com/files/howto.html. You should know that the page "howto.html" is part of a site called "www.sampleurl.com." If this page turns out to be a "not found" error, or doesn't have a link to the site's home page, you can try typing in the location box "http://www.sampleurl.com/" or "http://www.sampleurl.com/files/" to see if you can find a menu or table of contents. Sometimes a file has been moved or its name has changed, but the site itself still has content useful to you--this is a way to find out.

If there's a tilde (~) in the URL, you're probably looking at someone's personal page on a larger site. For example "http://www.bigsite.com/~jonesj/home.html" refers to a page at www.bigsite.com where J. Jones has some server space in which to post Web pages.

Navigation

Be sure you can use your browser's "Go" list, "History" list, "Back" button and "Location" box where the URL can be typed in. In Web research, you're constantly following links through to other pages then wanting to jump back a few steps to start off in a different direction. If you're using a computer at home rather than sharing one at school, check the settings in your "Cache" or "History list" to see how long the places you've visited will be retained in history. This will determine how long the links will show as having been visited before (i.e, purple in Netscape, green in our site). Usually, you want to set this period of time to cover the full time frame of your research project so you'll be able to tell which Web sites you've been to before.

Bookmarks or favourites

Before you start a research session, make a new folder in your bookmarks or favourites area and set that folder as the one to receive new bookmark additions. You might name it with the current date, so you later can identify in which research session the bookmarks were made. Remember you can make a bookmark for a page you haven't yet visited by holding the mouse over the link and getting the popup menu (by either pressing the mouse button or right clicking, depending on what flavour computer you have) to "Add bookmark" or "Add to favourites." Before you sign off your research session, go back and weed out any bookmarks which turned out to be uninteresting so you don't have a bunch of irrelevant material to deal with later. Later you can move these bookmarks around into different folders as you organize information for writing your paper--find out how to do that in your browser.

Printing from the browser

Sometimes you'll want to print information from a Web site. The main thing to remember is to make sure the Page Setup is set to print out the page title, URL, and the date. You'll be unable to use the material if you can't remember later where it came from.

"Saving as" a file

Know how to temporarily save the contents of a Web page as a file on your hard drive or a floppy disk and later open it in your browser by using the "file open" feature. You can save the page you're currently viewing or one which is hyperlinked from that page, from the "File" menu or the popup menu accessed by the mouse held over the hyperlink.

Copying and pasting to a word processor

You can take quotes from Web pages by opening up a word processing document and keeping it open while you use your browser. When you find text you want to save, drag the mouse over it and "copy" it, then open up your word processing document and "paste" it. Be sure to also copy and paste the URL and page title, and to record the date, so you know where the information came from.

Be prepared to cite your Web references

Find out what form of bibliographic references your instructor requires. Both the MLA and APA bibliographic formats have developed rules for citing sources on CD-ROM and the internet. Instructions for Citing Electronic Sources are available at many libraries, including the Purdue University Online Writing Lab ( http://owl.english.purdue.edu/Files/110.html).

Skills for Online Searching

There are many sources on the Web to help you learn search skills. Many of the concepts for using Web search engines also apply to searching online library catalogs and CD-ROMs. This section of the manual will get you started and point you to other online sources where you can learn more.

Learn how search syntax works

Search syntax is a set of rules describing how users can query the database being searched. Sophisticated syntax makes for a better search, one where the items retrieved are mostly relevant to the searcher's need and important items are not missed. It allows a user to look for combinations of terms, exclude other terms, look for various forms of a word, include synonyms, search for phrases rather than single words. The main tools of search syntax are these:

Boolean logic

Boolean logic allows the use of AND, OR and NOT to search for items containing both terms, either term, or a term only if not accompanied by another term. The links below and all the Web search engines "search help" have a lot of good examples of Boolean logic. Tip: NOT can be dangerous. Let's say you want to search for items about Mexico, but not New Mexico, so you use NOT to exclude the word "New" from your retrieved set. This would prevent you from retrieving an article about "New regulations in Mexico" because it contained the word "New," though that wasn't what you intended.

Wildcards and truncation

This involves substituting symbols for certain letters of a word so that the search engine will retrieve items with any letter in that spot in the word. The syntax may allow a symbol in the middle of a word (wildcard) or only at the end of the word (truncation). This feature makes it easier to search for related word groups, like "woman" and "women" by using a wildcard such as "wom*n." Truncation can be useful to search for a group of words like "invest, investor, investors, investing, investment, investments" by submitting "invest*" rather than typing in all those terms separated by OR's. The only problem is that "invest*" will also retrieve "investigate, investigated, investigator, investigation, investigating." The trick, then is to combine terms with an AND such as "invest*" AND "stock* or bond* or financ* or money" to try and narrow your retrieved set to the kind of documents you're looking for.

Phrase searching

Many concepts are represented by a phrase rather than a single word. In order to successfully search for a term like "library school" it's important that the search engine allow syntax for phrase searching. Otherwise, instead of getting documents about library schools you could be getting documents about school libraries or documents where the word "library" and "school" both appear but have nothing to do with a library school.

Proximity

This allows the user to find documents only if the search terms appear near each other, within so many words or paragraphs, or adjacent to each other. It's a pretty sophisticated tool and can be tricky to use skillfully. Many times you can accomplish about the same result using phrase searching.

Capitalization

When searching for proper names, search syntax that will distinguish capital from lower case letters will help narrow the search. In other cases, you would want to make sure the search engine isn't looking for a particular pattern of capitalization, and many search engines let you choose which of these options to use.

Field searching

All database records are divided up into fields. Almost all search engines in CD-ROM or online library products and the more sophisticated Web search engines allow users to search for terms appearing in a particular field. This can help immensely when you're looking for a very specific item. Say that you're looking for a psychology paper by a professor from the University of Michigan and all you remember about the paper is that it had something about Freud and Jung in its title. If you think it may be on the Web, you can do a search in Alta Vista, searching for "Freud" AND "Jung" and limit your search to the "umich.edu" domain, which gives you a pretty good chance of finding it, if it's there.

Make sure you know what content you're searching

The content of the database will affect your search strategy and the search syntax you use to retrieve documents. Some of the different databases you'll encounter in your library and online research are:

Representation or summary of a document

If a document has been summarized, like a library catalog entry where certain features like title and author have been recorded along with a sentence or two of description, don't expect to retrieve the document by looking for keywords in the text. A search is only searching what's in the database--the representation, not the document itself. Consult the section on searching the library catalog for further details.

Index and abstract of a document

When a document like a journal article has been indexed and an abstract written, a human indexer has helped organize the document for easy retrieval. He or she chosen some words, phrases and concepts which represent the subject matter of the document and has attached those to the database record as "descriptors." The specific terms usually come from a book of terms used by that database producer, to promote consistency between indexers.

The indexer, or possibly the author of the article, has written an abstract or summary of the article's content which is included in the database. Again, it's important to realize that you're not searching the entire text of the document but someone's representation of the document. If you can zero in on some of the database's descriptors which accurately describe the topic you're looking for, you can easily retrieve all the articles with the same descriptors. If you do a keyword search in this type of database without checking the permissible descriptors, you're hoping that the indexer will have used your keyword in the summary or that the author will have used it in the title of the article.

Full text of a document

Searching full text documents gives you a good chance of retrieving the document you want, provided you can think of some key words and phrases which would have been included in the text. The problem is retrieving too many documents when you're looking for something particular, because common words and concepts can appear in documents irrelevant to your topic. This is one of the problems with internet search engines which index the full text of Web pages. The more skilled you can become in your use of search syntax, the greater will be your success in finding relevant information in a full text database.

Online resources for learning search skills

Most of what you need to know is covered by several online tutorials listed at Links for Research--Other Resources - Web and internet tutorials. There is a lot of specific help with search syntax published by each of the search engines, since they all differ in their syntax. See the Links for Research – Search Engines for links to the search help pages.

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