The Quiz
You must know the following material plus make a trip to
the library to do the following research for looking up journal
citations.
Remember, you are honor bound to do this yourself, or
you may work as a team with your classmates, as long as all of you go to
the library and find the answer. You only hurt
yourself in the long run if you don't go. You are going to need
these skills in the future at Lyon.
-
Go to the library and find the current rack for
magazines. Find the title that is next
to "Mother Jones." Remember that title for your test.
Again, the current magazines are to the right as you enter the
library. There is a name tag on the shelf where every magazine
is kept, so even if the magazine is missing, you still know what
should be there.
-
While at the library, go to the old journal issues
in the back of the building and find the "National Geographic
Magazine. Look at volume 110, July-December of 1956 and look
in the December issue. What's the first title listed on the
cover page? You'll need to know this title for the quiz.
Picking a
Topic
The quiz will ask you how to pick topics.
- Your professor may assign you a topic.
- If he doesn't, you can discuss ideas with him or in
your class about possible topics.
- Browse through the library's weekly magazines and
newspapers on the
rack in the front lobby. They are full of ideas.
- Check out the newswpapers link on the home page.
They list hundreds of ideas.
- Browse through the encyclopedias located in the
Reference section for something that really excites your
interest.
- You can also check out the Reference
link on the library's page. Click on
this link and then click on the Oxford Reference Collection.
This is a collection of reference materials that can give you
a quick summary of any topic you are interested in.
|
Primary or Secondary?
For your quiz, you'll have to know the difference
between
Primary sources and Secondary.
-
Primary source
This is a document containing firsthand information. Examples
of primary sources include presidential papers, diaries, memoirs,
letters, journals, photographs, film footage, interviews, public
records, newspaper clippings, etc.
For example, "The Presidential Papers of Bill Clinton" located at
Little Rock, Arkansas in the Presidential Library, are primary
sources because they contain material that the president actually
wrote or that came out of the presidential office during his
presidency. A book written by Bill Clinton would
be a primary source because if it was in his own words.
-
Secondary source
Secondary sources are any works that are one step removed from the
original source, usually describing information derived from primary
source materials.
An example is a book written about Bill Clinton. The
information used to write the book would be taken from primary sources
(interviews, presidential papers, etc.) and described by
another person.
Do we Have
Enough Primary and Secondary Material for your Paper?
- One student last semester wanted to write a paper on
Disney's Animation Process from start to finish.
After consulting with me, he decided he needed lots of
primary materials that could only be borrowed from
out-of-state. He didn't have enough time before
the paper was due to get the materials so he changed his
topic.
|
Peer-Reviewed Journals or Magazines?
For your quiz you will have to know the difference
between [peer-reviewed, juried, refereed, scholarly articles] and
magazines.
- Peer-reviewed, Juried, Refereed Articles?
This is a
a scholarly journal that requires an article to
be subjected to a process of critical evaluation by one or more
experts on the subject, known as referees. Changes may be suggested to the author(s) before an article is finally accepted for publication.
Examples of scholarly, or peer reviewed journals are: Journal of the
American Medical Association, The American Journal of Psychiatry,
etc.
Scholarly journals usually have the word "journal" in the title.
These juried articles usually have a bibliography and a list of
references so you can read more about their topic.
Simply
put, a team of experts in the field tears apart the article
and makes the author correct it until it suits them, and then it is
published.
- Magazine Articles?
The magazine is a popular interest periodical usually containing
articles on a variety of topics, written by various authors in a
non-scholarly style.
Most magazines are printed on glossy paper, heavily illustrated, and
contain advertising.
Articles are usually
short (less than five pages long), frequently unsigned, rarely
checked by editors, and do not
include a bibliography or list of references for further reading.
Some examples are: Newsweek, People, Time, U.S. News and World
Report, Rolling Stone, etc.
Past or
Present Info
- If your paper is about current topics, check and see
if we have enough information.
- If your paper is about historical events, check and
see if we have enough sources before you commit to a
paper. We do have some excellent historical
electronic databases and print titles. The
Newspaper Database "LexisNexis" covers a wide span of
years, and we have the historical "New York Times" and
the Wall Street Journal" full-text from their beginnings
in 1851 and 1889 respectively. "JSTOR" also has
complete runs of journals, full-text, online.
|
Narrowing Your topic
For your quiz you may have to narrow a topic that I
assign to you.
-
Suppose I fish around for the topic: Feral Cats. In
Academic Search Premier I found 120 hits about Feral Cats. I
was overwhelmed by the pro's and con's of saving or killing Feral
Cats in these titles. There was too much.
-
I picked one article I was really attracted to and
looked for key words in the article that might lead me to other
articles of the same nature. I found:
-
Animal Rights
-
FERAL cats
-
FERAL mammals
-
Quality of life
-
Vaccination of Animals
-
Animal welfare
-
I combined "Feral cats and animal welfare" in a
search. That narrowed my hits to 16 articles about helping the cats.
What did I just do? I looked for one article I really liked
(defining my topic) and got keywords from it. I combined
those with FERAL cat and narrowed my search.
"And"
Narrows a search
Anytime you want narrow a search in just
about any database, you can "and" your ideas.
"And" will narrow your search. If I combined cats
and dogs in a search in Academic Search Premier, the
diagram below shows you that I would only get a small
segment of material that contained both cats and dogs.
The blue color is all I would get.
The same thing applies to FERAL cats and animal welfare.
 |
Broadening a Topic
For your quiz I may ask you to broaden some searches.
-
Suppose I was looking for a book about FERAL cats in
iLink, our library catalog. If I typed in FERAL cat I get the
message: "Item Not Found, Perhaps the following list will help."
-
I have to broaden my topic by leaving off FERAL. A
search for cats gets me all the books we have in the library, but none
of them deal with FERAL cats.
-
In this case, I have to go somewhere else for books.
I would pick the database WorldCat, an international database of books.
I found lots of books in WorldCat. But then I have to
Inter-Library Loan them, meaning I had better get on with my project
ASAP because it takes up to two weeks to get inter-library loan books.
"Or" Broadens a
Topic Search
Anytime you want to broaden a search in just about any
database, you can "or" your ideas. "Or"
will broaden your search. The diagram below shows what happens when
when "or" is used. Dogs or cats get all the material about cats and all
the material about dogs and all the material that has both cats and
dogs.
|
Finding a Book from a
Citation
A citation is a brief summary of how to find a book or
article. It includes the author, title, date published, publisher,
published location, page numbers and/or journal volume numbers.
The citation below is a book cite. Why? You
start with an author. There is only one title, and you get where
it was published, the publisher
and publication date. You would go to the books, videos's and
DVD's link and click on
The Mabee-Simpson Library Catalog, type in the title:
Liberty!: The American Revolution to see if we have it.
Fleming, Thomas. Liberty!: The American
Revolution. New
York: Viking, 1997.
|
|
What Does a Journal
Article Citation Look Like?
For your quiz, be prepared to conduct a search in the
Full-text Electronic or Paper Journals for a certain journal title
and to tell me what range of years we have for the electronic and/or
paper editions.
The cite below is a journal article. Why? Again, you
start with an author. But look, there are 2 titles. One is the name of
the article in the journal: The Lake of Seduction.... and then there is
the name of the journal which is underlined: JTD: Journal of Theatre and
Drama. Then you have a volume number, the published year, and the page
numbers.
Brown, Erella. "The Lake of Seduction: Silence, Hysteria,
and the Space of Feminist Theatre." JTD: Journal of
Theatre and Drama 2 (1996):
175-200.
|
|
|
We may have either the paper copy or the electronic copy in our
library. Here's how you find out:
 Go
to the library's homepage at: library.lyon.edu and then click on
the Journal Articles link.
 Then
click on Full-Text Electronic or Paper Journals.
Punch
in the title of the journal into the search box. If we own it,
it will give the links to follow to get it. I typed in: JTD:
Journal of Theatre and Drama in their search box like this.
Well, we don't have it. It's time for
Inter-library loan, or drop this cite and find something that we do
have.
Here's an example of what it looks like when we do have
a title. I searched for American Theatre. I can click on any
of these links and search for what I need, knowing that we have 1994 to
the present in Proquest, and 1995 to the present in Academic Search
Premier, etc.
To find paper journals in the library, the best thing to
do is go to the library catalog and search by the journal's title.
The current year of paper copy can be found in the
magazine racks located on the right as you enter the building.
Anything older than the current year is stored in the back of the
building on the same floor. So I could find all the 2006 copies in
the racks at the front of the building, and past issues in the back of
the building.
That is the end of Chapter 4. Good luck on the
test.
Contact Us
Mabee-Simpson Library,
Lyon College
2300 Highland Road, Batesville, AR 72501
Front desk (870) 698-4205
Inter-library Loan (870) 698-1744
Last Maintenance: Aug 12, 2007
|
Your Research Library at