Soon students will be coming in looking for primary source articles for biology. This basically means experiments. The best place to find these articles is: EBSCO Academic Search Premier, Gale Expanded Academic ASAP, or Gale's General Science Collection.
Use a keyword that describes what they are looking for and the keywords "Research" AND "Methods" AND "Results" and limit to "peer reviewed." Wait to limit to full-text until after you search, that way you get a sense of if there is a lot, or a little, available on a subject. If there isn't much, dig into what you get and see if the articles are available full-text in another database, or see if the student can wait a few days for an ILL.
Limiting to an article type doesn't work well. There isn't a specific article type for what we're looking for in these databases.
EBSCO's Science Reference Center is not a good source for this type of article. This database is geared more towards K-12 and has few research reports.
Monday, September 20, 2010
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Libstats: Logging Reference Questions
Greetings: Today I want to talk a bit about using Libstats to log questions.
We started using this on September 1st. Since we were not able to all get trained at the same time, here are a few notes regarding what you should and shouldn't do while using it:
-Location: Leave as is, if you're at the reference desk
-Question Info:
Other is for questions we would have only made a hash mark for. There is no need to enter any question or answer information for these questions. Just select "Other" and "General" under question type, and click "Save Question/Answer."
Subject is for a question that is not an author, title, or criticism, but you record a question and sometimes an answer. For example, a citation question.
-Read Score: Do not record a read score.
Be careful about the selections at the top, the system will "remember" what you last used. So be sure that the settings are accurate. For example, once you select "Not Owned" everything will be "Not Owned" until you change it back to "Owned."
That's all for now. There will be more on this subject later.
We started using this on September 1st. Since we were not able to all get trained at the same time, here are a few notes regarding what you should and shouldn't do while using it:
-Location: Leave as is, if you're at the reference desk
-Question Info:
Other is for questions we would have only made a hash mark for. There is no need to enter any question or answer information for these questions. Just select "Other" and "General" under question type, and click "Save Question/Answer."
Subject is for a question that is not an author, title, or criticism, but you record a question and sometimes an answer. For example, a citation question.
-Read Score: Do not record a read score.
Be careful about the selections at the top, the system will "remember" what you last used. So be sure that the settings are accurate. For example, once you select "Not Owned" everything will be "Not Owned" until you change it back to "Owned."
That's all for now. There will be more on this subject later.
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