Library 101 Orientation Series: How to be an efficient and effective reseacher
Video series all about relevant resources and how to be an efficient researcher.
This orientation series will help you be successful in your program as you will be constantly asked to do research. Ohio University's Alden Library has extensive resources from: research articles, textbooks, case studies, and APA resources. Ohio University's Alden Library is also used for some assigned readings.
Searching the library for resources is a bit trickier than searching Google, so be sure to go through this Library 101 Orientation Series and explore this guide through the green tabs on the left. There are tips on how to search databases effectively, getting full text to journal articles, brainstorming your research topics, and all of my (Hanna, your librarian) contact information.
If you are completing this for credit, please do not miss the quiz below as directed in your syllabus. Let me know if you have any questions.
This short video will give you a brief tour of the library's homepage.
ArticlesPlus is the first green tab on the library's homepage and is the default search. This video will show you some of its features and walk you through how to get full-text to online content.
If you are looking for books or journals, then ALICE is the best place to search.
You have an assignment that says, “Pick a current topic that relates to your discipline or the class.” And you’re thinking, “I have no idea where to start.” This video tells you where to start when it comes to brainstorming and getting your topic off the ground.
This video focuses on taking your research topic and how to search for it in databases. It’s not the same as searching Google, so this video walks you through that transition.
*See also 'Searching Tips & Tricks' tab.
PubMed is one of the most-used databases for anything related to health and this video highlights the source in more detail.
For this video, I will be talking to you about credibility and how to evaluate different resources. Topics include: peer-review vs. scholarly, how to evaluate resources, and an intro to a tool I created to help quickly evaluate journal articles.
<--- All of the resources/tools utilized are available on different tabs of this guide.
Learning APA is a rights of passage. Some of what you will learn about citing in APA will come from your instructors, experience writing/citing, and what you learn along the way. Below are some resources for you to use as well as some common APA mistakes.
My favorite APA resources:
Common APA Mistakes:
- Do not cite everything you find online as a website. If you are citing an online blog or news source, make sure to add the full date. Know what KIND of source you are citing, not just where it lives.
- Wanting to cite a quote/statistic from an article, but it's cited from somewhere else? Cite who OWNS it, not where you found it.
- When citing an electronic journal article, always cite the DOI, if there is one. If not, you need to cite the ORIGINAL source (journal website) not the database link
- If website, is there an author or appropriate organization to cite? If not, cite the organization (example: CDC/NIH) as the author
- Article title in sentence case (lower case).
Zotero will save and cite all of your resources for you!
Full instructions to download and use Zotero is on the Zotero Guide.
Zotero at-a-glace video:
Click to enter
- Plagiarism GuideFAQs, tutorial, and more