For this month’s brownbag, we invited our wonderful librarian, Ellysa Cahoy, to give us tips about the most effective ways to gather the most pertinent literature about our research.
There are several resources accessible through the PSU library website.
-> Through this link, you can access dissertations and theses.
-> Through this link, you can access citation guides in APA and MLA format.
- There was a question about whether we can access the library after we graduate. Currently, you can access the library within 6 months after your graduation – so download all the literature you need during this period!
- If you find a good article that is pertinent to your research, don’t forget to carry out the following steps:
- Peruse the bibliography for any other good literature.
- Search who cited that article/book
- Search on the journal that the article was published in
- When using ERIC, always use advanced search, with the thesaurus function!
- After you carry out a search on ERIC, you can save your search and not do the search ever again! You will need your own Proquest account for this.
- For good searches you have, you can receive RSS feeds and have notifications on newly published articles. Use the website feedly to receive RSS feeds.
- On ERIC, you need to use ‘-‘ (dashes) in order to group words together; On Google Scholar, you need to use ‘”‘ (double quotation marks) in order to group words together.
- When you are requesting interlibrary loans, it is possible to request chapters from books sent to you. In that case, the librarian in that library will scan & send the file to you for good!
The most important of all!
When you are in doubt about gathering literature, set up individual meetings with our librarian, Ellysa!
Ellysa Cahoy (ellysa@psu.edu or 814-865-9696)
For the brownbag audio file, follow the link below.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yOsmUTaHHb7Uvpr6jK-3k6sStvEgAzom/view?usp=sharing