Research

SWRK3130

September 19, 2017

Dom Taylor

Religion and Social Work Librarian

Elizabeth Dafoe Library

Social Work Subject Guide

My hope is for you to experience the library as something that is:

Useful: it helps with your research and university experience.
Usable: it is not difficult to figure out.
Desirable: you enjoy your experience in the library or using library systems.

Aside from this, I want to make questions like, "How do I know what I know?", "How is authority and/or credibility established?", and, "What perspectives have been excluded or included in this information?" more prevalent in your research.

My goal as your librarian

1. Determine a topic: Pick something that interests you and try to find an aspect that you can narrow down. This is a good time to use encyclopedias/reference sources (e.g.,Encyclopedia of Canadian Social Work [2005], CREDO Reference, SAGE Research Methods Online, Blackwell Reference), Google Scholar, Google, Wikipedia, news publications, and blogs.

2. Formulate a focused research question/thesis: neither too broad nor too narrow. This is tricky and will take practice. You can start by answering "who," "what," "why," "when," and "how" questions. Set some parameters (e.g., dates, geographic location, demographic information), but be ready to change them.

3. From your question, identify keywords, including synonyms and related concepts, and possible subject headings: You can search for standard subject headings here. Concept mapping can be helpful.

Basic Search Strategy

4. Identify possible types of useful information: scholarly articles (including research articles), systematic reviews, literature reviews, statistics, legislation, government reports, and or public policy documents.

5. Make a list of sites and databases where you can find these types of information. The Social Work Subject Guide is a good place to start. You can also do a general search in the library catalogue. This is a very important step.

6. Combine keywords, phrases, subject headings into search queries: Try many different searches and combinations of terms. Expect that it will take at least 10 different searches to get a good feel for what is out there.

7. Keep track of interesting articles! (see slide on Zotero below)

The guiding principle of searching:

EXPERIMENTATION

If you have issues finding results in Step 6, go back to Step 2 and make some adjustments.

Searching

Using databases and subject guides

Databases

Subject-specific
Often have their own database-specific subject terms/ controlled vocabularies. Sometimes they bring up more results than the catalogue.
Subject terms can be organized and structured to show relationships between terms (e.g., "Child Welfare" is broader than "Child support")

UoM Library Catalogue

Has articles from a variety of databases, but the coverage may not be 100%. It is worth checking both databases and the catalogue.
Subject terms are not presented hierarchically (no relationships)

Database VS. Catalogue

Subject terms? Keywords? Both?

Subject Terms

Usually defined by librarians or information specialists
Allow linking articles by topic instead of the specific terms used in a given article
It is easier to find articles related to your general topic
Sometimes inappropriate or out-of-date

Keywords

Based on everyday language
Effective searching relies on knowing synonyms and commonly used terms
Can generate irrelevant results. Based on the frequency of the keyword rather than relevancy
Searches all available or selected parts of a resources (e.g., title, author, etc..)

USE BOTH!

Example of a database subject term

This is an example from Academic Search Premier's Thesaurus (EBSCOhost database)

How do you find the right database?

You can use the Database A-Z listing and do some searching
You can go to a relevant Subject Guide

Provide you with field-specific information and resources:

Databases
Encyclopedias and dictionaries
Research, writing, and citation tools
Relevant associations
Other helpful info

Here are some guides that might be useful to your research

SOCIAL WORK

SOCIAL WORK IN HEALTH CARE

STATISTICS AND DATA

GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS

LAW

NATIVE STUDIES

Subject guides

Phrase searching: most search engines allow for phrase searching. This means that you can search for whole phrases (e.g., "child welfare") instead of individual words (e.g., "child" + "welfare"). Just put the phrase you want to search in quotation marks. This will help limit your results!

Identify synonyms: When you are using keywords, remember that authors do not always use the same words for the same concepts. For example, you may want to look up "substance use", "substance abuse," "substance misuse" and "addiction*". Given that each of these terms is or has been in use, it is helpful to look them up.

**You can find some video tutorials on search strategies here

A few search tips

Truncation: * (asterix) symbol is added near the end of a word to find all variations of that word (e.g., "Indigen*" will find results for "Indigenous," "Indigeneity," and "Indigenism"). This will increase the amount of results. Not always the same symbol in every search engine. Be sure to check.

Wildcards: # (pound) symbol can be added within or at the end of a word to represent 0 to 1 characters (any character). This means you would add a "#" symbol for each character you want to search. For example "wom#n" will look up "women," "womyn," and "woman;" "friend####" will look up "friend", "friends," and "friendship" (etc...). This will increase the amount of results. Not always the same symbol in every search engine. Check.

Boolean Operators (AND/OR/NOT): These are words that cause search engines to modify their behaviour according to the given word or "operator." Let's look at this diagram to get a better idea.

AND

OR

NOT

Trauma

"Social Work"

A search for trauma AND "social work" will find results that contain both terms and will exclude results that only have one of the two terms.

Trauma

"Social Work"

A search for trauma OR "social work" will find results that contain either of the search terms. This will generate more results. Handy for synonyms.

A search for trauma NOT "social work" will find results that contain trauma but do NOT contain "social work." Use this sparingly and play around with it.

Trauma

"Social Work"

+

Limiters

Built-in features in databases and catalogues that allow you to limit results. Limiting may seem strange, but when there are tens of thousands of results available, you need to narrow your search down. Limiters are an easy way to do this!

Limit to peer-reviewed and full text online

Limit to resource type (e.g. articles)

Limit by publication date

Limit to location if you want print resources

Grey literature is information that is usually not purely academic nor is it usually commercially published. This includes publications from government departments/agencies, non-governmental organizations, and industry.

Types of grey literature include reports, white papers, policy documents, data sets, dissertations, standards, etc...

"Grey Literature"

Finding grey literature

Grey literature is found in a number of places (e.g.,our catalogue, databases, Google, GoogleScholar, organizational/government/industry websites)

Here are a few places to look:

Our guide's section on policy
Public Documents database (Canadian policy and reports)
ODESI and StatsCan (for statistics)
Indigenous Studies Portal (not just grey literature)
NGO Google Search
Organization websites: CCPA-Manitoba

Public Affairs Information Services (PAIS) International
Government websites (e.g. Manitoba)
Community Health Online Digital Archive & Research Resource (CHODARR)
Canadian Social Research Links (personal site with a big following)

Go to Google and put "site:" + the general web address of the entity you want to search + a space + any keywords OR phrases you want to look up

Searching organization, industry, and government websites

site:www.policyalternatives.ca "social welfare"

For example, to search CCPA:

How do we know something counts as "good" information?
Who gets to create and validate information? Who doesn't?
What is meant by expertise? Are official credentials the way to determine this?
What counts as trustworthy or credible?
Be aware of your own bias es (we all have them)!

Evaluating Information

Handy tool: CRAAP Test

Currency: When was the information published? If it is a website, has it been updated recently? This criteria is dependent on the purpose of your research and your instructor's guidelines (e.g., published within the last five years).
Relevance: Is the information appropriate for your research? Does it relate directly to your topic? Does research contained match your purpose (e.g., is it academic or a blog post)?
Authority: Who is the author and what are their credentials/expertise? Are articles peer-reviewed? Are books self-published or published by academic presses? Authority will depend heavily on subject.
Accuracy: This is difficult to figure out, but you can look for signs, such as citations in the source (the number and type) and the number of times a source has been cited. Is the claim verifiable? Is there an effort to "make a case" for the perspective put forward?
Perspective/purpose: Is the purpose of the information clear? Does it acknowledge other perspectives/arguments and take time to address them? Is there a clear bias or is it balanced?

There are plenty of Academic Libraries that use a version of the CRAAP test. My take was inspired by this particular one from Western University.

Limitations of CRAAP

Currency: Field/subject specific. You may need background knowledge or expertise to know how currency affects the usefulness of info.
Relevance: Again this is field/subject-specific. Also, you have to be sure that relevance doesn't just mean "information that says what I agree with." Relevance has to be wider and focus on relevance to the larger topic.
Authority: This is a difficult one to tease out. Finding out about an individual author can be problematic. Tools like peer-review, citations, and credentials help.
Accuracy: If you are new to a field or learning about a particular topic, how are you supposed to determine the accuracy of a given info source?
Perspective/purpose: Often, the purpose of an article doesn't match up with how it can be used. For example, a documentary on the history of Canada can be used in the classroom as an "educational tool" (i.e., potentially it's intended purpose) or as an example of the erasure of actual history and the propagation of a harmful narrative (e.g., critical analysis of Terra Nullius-based assumptions).

Often times you will re-use good information in multiple assignments. This is fine, but don't plagiarize yourself!
It is helpful to have an organized list of articles that you want to use.
Instead of re-writing citations down every time you use them, there are tools that make this work easier! Some tools even extract citation information automatically from databases and individual books and articles.

Keeping track of citations

Some citation managers

Zotero

Multiple citation styles available
Keep a list of resources on your e-shelf and organize them into folders
Attach PDF versions of articles
Automatically create citations
Plug-in for Word
Open source/free

Library Catalogue

Multiple citation styles available
Keep a list of resources on your e-shelf and organize them into folders
Free

Databases

Not always an option
APA style is not always available
Sometimes you can create lists, but this is usually within specific database providers (e.g., EBSCO and ProQuest).
Free through UoM