Lesson One -Presearch Activity - Issues and Controversies and SIRS Databases -
Read background information about your topic to get acquainted with the issues and viewpoints and to gather keywords to use in your search.
Lesson Two - Search Strategies -
Keywords are the important words in your search statement.
Example: Laughter has many health benefits.
Keywords: laughter, health, benefits
Next we will decide which database to search in. You can think of this like shopping in a store. You wouldn't go to buy athletic shoes from Billy Fuccillo. You would go to a store that either carrier athletic shoes or specializes in them.
Similarly, you need to select a database that will likely contain the information you are seeking.
Next you will want to apply a search strategy. You can use truncation to get more results.
Example: laughter
Since there are many forms of the work laughter, you can truncate the word and use a wildcard. To truncate laughter, you would use laugh*.
Boolean searching
There are three boolean search terms: And, Or, Not.
Most of the time we want to use And to require that the terms be there.
Example: laugh* AND health* AND benefit*
Once in a while we will use not because we are getting results that we don't want.
Example: Penguins NOT PIttsburgh
Sometimes we want to use Or because that will help us search for other words that mean the same thing.
Example: Capital punishment or death penalty
Once you get your results, look at the subject headings to see if there are any that will help you. Click on the subject headings to focus your search.
Read the results. Are you getting results that you can use for your research paper? If not, ask for help with your search strategy.
When you find an article, you need to open us a Word document and do the following:
Save the MLA citation.
Save the persistent link.
Copy and paste in the entire text of the article.
Save this document into a folder for this research paper.
It is a great idea to make a back up of your folder onto a flash drive.
Lesson Three - Web Evaluation Rubric - Any web site (not library database) that you find using a search engine should meet the qualifications of the Web Evaluation Rubric or it will not be accepted.
MLA Citation - All sources of information need to be cited correctly using the MLA style.
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