Scientific Journalism aka Open Source Journalism
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Homosexuality the New Norm?
Gillard vs. Abbott
Welcome to Vagina Week!
Binders Full of Women
Are you serious?! Did Governor Romney just say what I thought he said during the 2nd Presidential Debate?
When covering how he would help women find equality in the workplace Romney said “I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks,’ and they brought us whole binders full of women.”
Yes, it’s clearly not a problem that we are severely underrepresented when it comes to positions of power, and underpaid. The solution is clear, all employers can just pick us out of a catalogue, pay us 70% as much, and problem solved!
Women and men, this is not what a future President of the United States of America would say in the 21st century.
You’ll sometimes find it necessary and worthwhile to pay for documents required in your research. The following information isn’t meant to discourage that practice. Rather, it’s offered to help you locate free online resources to bolster your writing and to fascinate and inspire you.
Directory of Open Access Journals links to free, full-text articles in more than 3,000 scientific and scholarly journals, approximately one-third of which are searchable.
The Library of Congress furnishes reference tools for researchers and makes certain digital collections, such as its exhibitions, available on the Web. Its American Memory collections include, for example, scanned images of the Walt Whitman Notebooks, which were recovered in 1995, more than half a century after vanishing from the library.
Virtual Reference Shelf, a directory of external links for researchers, writers, and students, is another service provided by the Library of Congress.
Internet Public Library (IPL) currently…
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(Reading this out of order? See Part 1 and Part 2.)
And now… the third and final installment in this series, Extending Your Research.
Getting the Full Text
If you are completely unsuccessful in finding the full text of an article, even after trying the databases in Part 1, your library’s resource, and anywhere else you can think of… there is still hope. Sometimes – sometimes – you can still get the text from somewhere else.
- Remember: It is not some sort of debate crime to quote the abstract. If that’s all you can access, don’t be afraid to use it. You may be missing most of the good quotes, but don’t let that prevent you from working with what you’ve got.
- Try going to the website of the journal it appears in. Sometimes you can access it directly.
- Try to find the full text through direct web searching…
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(Reading this out of order? See part 1.)
Okay, so you found a few (or hopefully, a lot) studies that look promising. Now what? They’re, like, 60 pages each. Nobody wants to read all the way through that much just to get a few good quotes. (Well, except for people like us, anyway.) On to Part 2 of the series: Now What?
Finding the Core
Usually, when confronted with a large stack of digital paper, there are several places you should look first before embarking on a tour of the whole document. In roughly the order most people would/should look, they are:
- The abstract and/or summary. Obviously, it’s supposed to summarize what the rest of the paper is about. Reading the abstract usually won’t get you very useful quotes, but it gives you an overview of the issue that’s useful in building your arguments. Sometimes, however, the most succinct…
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There’s nothing that beats a good PhD from a peer-reviewed journal – research nuts (like us) often become obsessed with finding sources with the best possible credentials. The Scholarly Research for Dummies series of articles is designed to give some tips and pointers to budding researchers to help them get up to speed on basic scholarly research. Part 1 is entitled Where to Look.
Google Scholar
For most debate purposes, the single most useful resource is Google Scholar. (Scholar is also accessible from the main Google page by clicking More (on the top bar) and then Scholar.) Google Scholar works just like a regular Google search, but searches a massive compilation of academic journals and other scholarly stuff – so you’re a lot more likely to find an authoritative-sounding study by Dr. Henry Someone, PhD, than a random rant by an unknown person identified only as “xxarg99”.
Google Scholar…
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Yasmin Helal 