e-Journals
•Access to e-journals for students
•Why use e-journals
•Basic searches
•More advanced techniques
Why use e-resources?
•Up-to-date information
•Short but detailed
•Focus on specific topics
•Peer-review
•You are expected to use e-resources in your assignments
•What is peer-review?
When an article has been evaluated and reviewed by
other experts and academics to make sure it is of a
good academic standard.
Why it matters
Data sets of over 22,000 students at the University of Huddersfield
found a correlation between time spent accessing e-resources and
degree classification
Choosing keywords
What are the key concepts of your assignment title?
Assignment:
Q: What is the impact of marketing junk-food
to teenagers using social media?
A: junk-food, marketing, social media,
teenagers
What alternative keywords do you need to use?
Synonyms, related words, plurals, other
spellings, abbreviations, acronyms, broader and
narrower terms
Background reading, thesauri, encyclopaedia
Make a list or mind map
Junk-food
Marketing
Social media
Teenagers
Fast-food
Adverts
Facebook
Teens
Convenience
food
Advertise
Twitter
Teen
Fast-foods
Advertize
Weibo
Young adult
Convenience
foods
Advertising
Web 2.0
Adolescent
Advertizing
Young person
Promote
Young people
Promotion
Sell
Selling
Search techniques

Wildcard truncators:
◦ ? is used to replace a letter in a keyword
when it has multiple spelling
globali?ation Will give results about globalisation and globalization
◦ * is used to search for keywords with
multiple endings
Librar* Will give results about library, libraries, Librarian,
Librarians and librarianship
Phrase searching:
“global warming”
This will only give you results where
the two words are next to each other
If you would like some more practise in
developing your ability to evaluate sources,
please follow this Leeds University link
http://library.leeds.ac.uk/tutorials/evaluating
Information Seeking Behaviour
Carol Kulthau’s Information Seeking Process
1. Initiation (recognise information need): apprehension
2. Selection (pick topic and plan search): optimism
3. Exploration (initial searches): anxiety
4. Formulation (develop focused search query): calm
focus
5. Collection (final search): increased confidence
6. Search closure: relief and satisfaction, or
disappointment
Many students skip steps 3 to 6
1.
Look again at your Research Assignment title
2.
Isolate the key concepts
3.
Create a table or mind-map for alternative keywords
4.
Try some of the more advanced search techniques
5.
Make a list of all the different types of searches you tried
 Clarke and Clarke: Research is a careful, systematic and
objective investigation conducted to obtain valid facts, draw
conclusions and established principles regarding an
identifiable problem in some field of knowledge.
 John .W. Best: Research is a systematic and objective analysis
and recording of controlled observations that may lead to the
development of generalizations, principles, theories and
concepts, resulting in prediction for seeing and possibly
ultimate control of events.
 Clifford Woody: Research is a careful enquiry or examination
in seeking facts or principles, a diligent investigation to
ascertain something.
 Mouley: It is the process of arriving at dependable solution to
the problems through the planned and systematic collection,
analysis and interpretation of data.