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GEOL 405: Environmental Geology: Library Session #1

Our First Day

Today we are going to work on the following:

1.). Learn to recognize formal peer-reviewed research sources from general research sources, such as books, magazines, or newspapers.  

2.) Understand the differences between primary and secondary research sources - including the type of research they involve and the type of information/data sources they contain.  

3.) Review how to search across many different disciplines and subjects all at once

4.) Learn how to use Inter-Library Loan (ILL)

5.) Understand the basics when it comes to APA citations.

 

Recognizing Research

Formal research stands out from the crowd just like formal wear would stand out if someone wore it to class on a random Tuesday morning.  (Anyone feel like putting on black tie attire this morning?). 

 

Formal academic research tends to have the following characteristics:  

  • found in academic journals (the titles of which are very long and formal-sounding) that can not be purchased in places like Barnes &Noble or Walmart.
  • written in a formal manner - particularly scientific papers that start off with an Abstract, followed by: Introduction / Materials and Methods / Discussion / Conclusion.  They will also have an extensive Works Cited section.
  • will contain numerous charts and graphs

Searching Across Disciplines

To search across many disciplines at once, we will be using the library's databases - or academic search engines.  Several of these that are perfect for GEOL 405 are listed below.

Primary Vs. Secondary

Primary Research is research where the authors that wrote the research article (or book) are the ones who actually did the research themselves.  They did the measuring, the capturing, the weighing, the dissecting, the pipetting, the centrifuging -- they did the actual steps themselves, then collected the results, analyzed it all, and finally wrote and published what results they found.

Secondary Research is research where someone went to a library and using either books or journals read about what other researchers did.  Then, once they had read about what a lot of other people did, they wrote a summary of what all of these other people did, and then published that summary.  

Inter-Library Loan (ILL)

Using ILL is really quite simple.  The link below will allow you to set up your account if you have not used it before - and you can also use the same link to access your account any time you need to retrieve an article that has just arrived or to request a new article.  

 

My ILL Account

We will go over a demonstration in class of how ILL works.