Scholarly vs. Popular Resources
Not all resources are written to be used in academic settings. It is important to understand if a resource is written for academic audiences (scholarly) or general audiences (popular) before selecting it for a research project. Below, you will find some of the ways to tell the difference.
Scholarly articles are:
Popular articles are:
It is important to look at every resource you find with a critical eye. There are many different methods to help you do this. Below are a few different methods for evaluation.
While Google Scholar should not be the only place you go for your research needs, it can be a great resource when starting out or looking for a specific article.
While you may be used to going to Google and typing in "Who invented the telescope" this will not work in a database. This is because search engines like Google use natural language processing. They can understand your questions as you ask them. Databases do not work this way. Databases use keyword searching.
Keyword searching involves taking a research question and pulling out the keywords. For example, if your research question is:
Do healthcare disparities in elderly women have a negative impact on patient outcomes?
You would look through the question and pick out the keywords. For this question, we can pull out disparities, elderly women, and healthcare.
Then, you would use Boolean connectors to connect the terms in a way that the database can understand. Your end search would look something like this:
disparities AND elderly women AND healthcare
PICO Questions
PICO is a mnemonic device that is used to help develop clinical questions for the health sciences. It stands for:
P: Population / Population
I: Intervention
C: Compared with
O: Outcome
PICO helps you create more focused questions. It can also help with search strategies as it gives you more options for keywords to help narrow down your results.
Use Boolean Connectors AND, OR, and NOT to refine your searches!
Use Truncation, Wildcards, and other Methods to Limit your Search!
This is EBSCO Discovery Service, this discovery search box searches across most of the library's resources all at once and can search some external resources.
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