2. ELECTRONIC RESEARCH
• Most of the research we do in the 21st century is electronic
• Electronic search engines can scour the internet—millions of websites in dozens of
languages—in a few seconds.
• Most of what results from a general search engine is commercial or not reliable.
• Intended to make money—not provide educational information
• Bogus
• Some are even created from plagiarized content
3. UNDERSTANDING DIFFERENT SOURCES
• Databases
• Where most serious academic research is published.
• A digital collection of different works—the college’s library pays for students to have
free and open access to different databases.
• Different Databases are devoted to different topics; they do not all contain the same
information
• Academic Search Premier: Interdisciplinary, covers subjects in the Humanities
(English, Philosophy, Religion, Art, History, etc.), Law, Medicine, Science, and
Social Sciences (Sociology, Anthropology, etc.)
• Alternative Press Index: 1991-present; information is usually extreme to political
right or left. Analyzes cultural, political, economic, and social aspects of North
American
• Business Source Premier: material related to business—marketing, management,
accounting, economics, etc.
4. DATABASES
• CINAHL: Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature. Covers nursing and
health related fields, alternative medicine, biomedicine, consumer health. Drug records,
clinical trials, etc.
• Communication and Mass Media Complete: contains material related to communication
and media—Communication studies (personal, family, health), Journalism, Media Arts/
Design, Public Opinion Polls, Television and Radio, etc.
• CREDO: like the GOOGLE of databases. Searches peer reviewed journals based on
general search terms. Searches need to be narrowed to find exact information
• ERIC: Education Resource Information Center. Contains information on educational
programs (career and vocational), community colleges, educational management, early
childhood education, higher education, teaching/ teacher education, urban/ rural
education
5. USING DATABASES
• Decide which databases you need to search within:
• If you are writing about female characters in television, you would look on Academic Search
Premier and Communication and Media…not necessarily on medical databases.
• Look in full text only:
• Some databases include “abstracts” or brief descriptions of sources…these are not to be
used. Instead, select “full text only”
• Timeframe:
• Some databases are well established with large historical reach, others only go back to
1990s with the creation of modern internet. Choose the ones that will work for your project.
• General vs. Specific Subject Databases
• Do you need to do a broad search about something to assist your argument from multiple
angles? Or, do you need to target specific information about a narrow field? You would
choose different databases for either of these.
6. WEBSITES
• If you choose to locate your sources on the open internet, then you need to know how to
pick the right sources.
• Websites range in credibility from academic research to idiotic rants of lunatics, so
you must learn to filter through the crap.
• A positive to using the open wed is that it’s free
• A negative is it doesn’t go through any screening test or fact checking like what
happens in databases.
• Popular search engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Dogpile, etc.
7. NARROWING YOUR SEARCH
• All search engines begin the same, with a keyword search bar.
• You could just do a general key word search, but then you get everything even
remotely related to those key words.
• A general search on video game violence returned over 88 mill results.
• You can’t possibly read or need all of those results, most likely you just find
something close and that’s fine…..but that’s not fine at all.
• Just like Databases have filters, search engines recognize specific words/ letters/
characters to filter out information.
• Putting quotation marks around a phrase bring up information with that exact phrase.
• Putting AND between phrases brings up sources with all of that specific material
• Putting NOT between phrases filters out unwanted material.
• Put site: and the type of site you want in your results. .gov; .org; .com
8. EVALUATING THE CREDIBILITY OF SOURCES
• Because so much information (and misinformation) is available to you, you must “filter out
the crap”
• When evaluating sources, you need to consider how to performs or contains material that
leads to its credibility:
• Author
• Language used
• Purpose
• Objectivity
• Domain name
• References used
9. THE CRAAP TEST
• A quick way to decide whether or not a source is credible is to see whether or not it
passes the CRAAP test.
• Currency: is the information up-to-date? When was it published?
• Relevance: is the information important to your topic? Does it help your argument? Is the
information to “elementary”?
• Authority: Who is the author? What are their credentials? Are they affiliated with an
organization that may skew their argument? Is the author qualified?
• Accuracy: Where is the information coming from? Is it supported by evidence or other
references? Has it been reviewed before publication? Is the language biased?
• Purpose: What is the purpose of the information? Does it inform? Teach? Entertain?
Sell? Is the purpose clear? Is the point of view objective/ impartial? Are their any biases?
10. IN-CLASS WRITING ACTIVITY
1) Find two sources through the SRC database related to violence in video games.
- Make the search criteria fit what it would be for our paper #4-
-Databases
-1990-PRESENT
-Search for full-text only
-look in newspaper or magazines (to narrow search criteria)
2) Write bibliographic citations for both according to MLA citation style. Use Pocket Style
Handbook or Purdue Online Writing Labe (OWL)
3) Write a paragraphs summary of one (with in-text citations) and a paragraph evaluating its
use for an argument about violence in video games.
