3 Step 3 | Gathering and Searching for Sources

Secondary Sources: Secondary sources are influenced by shifts in public thought over time. They analyze an event or previous research after the fact, often putting an event into historical context or comparing it with other resources, issues, trends, or movements. Common types of secondary sources include books, research articles, peer reviewed scholarly articles (which can also be primary), encyclopedia articles, and documentaries.

Popular Sources: Popular information is found within publications written for the public rather than for scholarly audiences. They do not always go through a rigorous review process and are less technical than scholarly materials. Articles found within popular sources may not include citations; instead, they may use hyperlinks online, and in print they may offer a less detailed, more surface-level summary of their topic. Wall Street Journal, People magazine, Vogue, and Rolling Stone are examples of popular publications. These sources can be helpful if your topic has to do with recent events, popular culture, or hobbies.

Scholarly Information: Scholarly information gives you a more in-depth understanding of a topic. This type of information is often found within scholarly books and journal articles. Scholarly books and articles undergo peer review, a rigorous review process by subject experts before publication. They usually contain subject-specific, technical language, and refer to the resources the authors used, including citations. Scholarly materials are often the product of a specific research project and contain information about the methods the authors use to reach their conclusions. These are helpful for projects where it is important to build a strong research-based foundation for your ideas or interpretation.

Google and Library Databases: The benefit of Google and library databases is that you can use them both to gain access to popular and scholarly sources, which will also have primary and secondary sources. It is understanding how to search within them that determines the success of your resource gathering. When you have gone through the process of choosing your topic, it is important to write down questions you have about the subject area that you want to explore. Due to the mechanics of Google’s search engine, it works well with you plainly asking the questions you wrote down. However, when you are searching within the academic library using various databases, you must use key words and subject terms. When records are uploaded to a database, specific metadata helps users find that item. By using a key word or subject term, you are telling the database to pull records matching that metadata. Another way of looking at this process is the use of hashtags on social media.

Some Sample Paper Sources

Tips for searching within the library

Searching on google is a process that has been made simple due to the function of the platform. Ask a question, you get various resources that could possibly answer your inquiry on the first attempt. However, when searching within library databases and journals, there are a few ways to make that process more efficient. By using key words derived from our background research, in combination with Boolean operators, and nesting techniques, the ability to locate materials that best suit your paper becomes less daunting.

Boolean Operators

Boolean operators (AND, OR, and NOT) help you broaden or narrow your search, depending on which operator you use. Boolean operators act on the keywords around them in a way similar to how math operators act on numbers (e.g., +, -, x).

AND – Specifies that all the keywords you connect with AND must be present in your search results and is most useful when you have two or more keywords.

• Example: Artificial Intelligence AND Chatbots AND College

You can use more than two keywords with AND but be careful not to add too many terms because they may overly restrict your results.

OR – Specifies that at least one of the keywords you searched for must be present in your search results. When you combine keywords with OR, you will retrieve more results than if you searched for just one of those terms. This is useful when you want to search for synonyms or closely related concepts for your topic simultaneously.

• Example:  Chatbots OR ChatGPT

NOT-   will restrict your search by omitting any keyword(s) that come after NOT. This is a useful way to prevent items containing irrelevant or unwanted keywords from appearing in your search results.

• Example: Artificial Intelligence AND ChatGPT NOT Machine Learning

Boolean operators follow an order of operations that determines how a finding tool will interpret your search. In a Boolean search NOT takes priority, followed by AND, and then OR. However, nesting allows you to combine multiple searches into a single search. By grouping similar keywords together within parentheses, it saves you from having to perform multiple searches all while improving your search.

Nesting

Nesting lets you combine multiple searches into a single search. It allows you to group similar concepts or keywords together within parentheses, so you do not have to perform multiple searches. Combined with Boolean operators like AND & OR, nesting is an efficient and effective way to improve your keyword search results.

Example for Using Nests

Let us say you want to search for information about the causes of anxiety. After brainstorming synonyms for your keyword “causes,” you come up with “reasons” and “factors.” Databases may use different terminology to talk about the same subject. Instead of performing three separate searches for anxiety with each term, you can instead use Boolean operator OR to search them all at once. Without parentheses, the search “anxiety AND reasons OR causes OR factors” would find sources containing “anxiety AND reasons,” or sources containing “causes” or “factors” without necessarily containing anything about anxiety. This will bring you way too many results, many of which will be irrelevant. To fix this search to find what you actually want, use nesting.

anxiety AND (reasons OR causes OR factors)

By combining the keywords “reasons,” “causes,” and “factors,” with OR inside the parentheses, the finding tool will first search for results containing any or all of those terms. By leaving “anxiety AND” outside of the parentheses, we are telling the finding tool that, no matter which of the three other terms it finds, “anxiety” must also be present in all of our results.

Illustration of a nested search

Using nested keywords lets us be more efficient by searching for all of these at the same time, rather than having to perform each search separately:

anxiety AND reasons
anxiety AND causes
anxiety AND factors