Advanced Special Topics: Sociology and Aging
Course Number: SY452
Subject: Sociology
This guide provides resources and tactics to help you research your SY452 final assignment. You will also find how-to guides on setting up, adding, and organizing citations in Zotero and creating in-text citations and bibliographies.
If you require assistance with research, you can always reach out to your Sociology Librarian.
Research Help
Book a research consultation with me:
Research Strategies - A Refresher
Developing your research strategy starts by making sure you have a workable research question.
Research Question
All good research starts with a strong research question.
When you develop your research question, you want to think about what you plan on researching research. This is a time to consider what you’re interested in knowing.
Your question should NOT be too specific or contain elements which are difficult to research.
For example, one of my research interests is in how newly diagnosed diabetics combat mental health issues through community engagement. So, my research question would look like:
What role does an individual's community play in helping diabetics handle mental health concerns?
But developing the research question is merely one step, next you need to break down the question into search terms.
Search Terms - The Basics of Research
To start, you'll need to look at your research question and consider what are the most important points in that question. What terms best indicate what you want to find out.
In the case of my research question, What role does an individual's community play in helping diabetics handle mental health concerns? I might highlight:
- diabetics
- community
- mental health
These will now become your primary search terms.
However, it is always a essential to brainstorm alternative or additional search terms. Having a wide array of search terms allows you to find more research depending on how authors write their articles/books etc.
For example, your search term list might look like:
- diabetics = diabetes, T1D (Type-1 Diabetes), T2D (Type-2 Diabetes), insulin dependant, hypoglycaemia
- community = groups, society, health community, health services
- mental health = well being, adjustment, life satisfaction, morale, emotional
Finding Articles - Tips & Tricks
Search Tactics and Tips
Here are some search tactics to help you in finding articles.
| What is the tactic? | What does the tactic do? | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Phrase searching | Use “quotation marks” to find more than one term in a row. | "mental health" |
| Truncation | Use an asterisk* at the end of a term to include multiple endings. | diab* diabetic, diabetes |
| Boolean AND | Use AND to ensure that all terms appear in every search result. | "heath information" AND diabetics |
| Boolean OR | Use OR to ensure that at least one term appears in every search result. | Reddit OR "online message boards" |
Additional Search Tips
- Field searching = use the drop-down beside the search box to find terms in specific areas of results. Codes beside each field tell the database where to search for a term.
- E.g. ab(diabetes)→all results will have diabetes in their abstracts
- Peer review limit = check off “peer reviewed” to search for published research literature.
- Date limit = confine your search to a specific date range.
Putting it all together
Using some of the tactics above your final search might look like:
(diabetics OR diabetes or T1D) AND ("mental health" OR "well being" OR adjustment) AND (community OR groups OR society OR "health community")
- Note: when using a search string, don’t use Advanced Search, unless you want to rebuild the string.
One Final Tip - Subjects vs Search Terms
Don’t just use search terms – think about Subject Terms instead!
Subjects are different from search terms because Many databases use subject headings that are unique to that particular database. This controlled vocabulary allows for consistency of terms across the database.
So, if you are looking for articles on mental health therapies, you might want to see what subject your database lists this under.
Example:
- search term: “mental health”
- Subject: “Mental health services”
Using the Library & Finding Articles
Where to start
Start with the Sociology Guide - the section Finding Articles includes a number of essential databases to explore your research topic.
My best bets: Sociology @ ProQuest and Sociological Abstracts but you should also be willing to try some of the other databases too.
Finding the Right Article:
Two final tips
Now that you’ve found articles, use some databases tools so you don’t get lost in your results & get the best results possible!
Save & Pin articles that match your criteria.
- Remember – you MIGHT have to log into the Database.
Create Alerts or Auto-Searches to keep the work going after you’ve logged off
Some Databases will let you set up alters as new articles are published or released on your subject/search
- Remember – SET A TIME LIMIT! Or you might be getting those results until you graduate
Citation & Zotero
Citation
Citing any work you quote from or use as part of your assignment is an essential and required step in academic work. There are a number of resources you can use to build citations. To get help with citations, you can visit either of these resources:
Below you will find a series of videos on creating citations using the Library's various databases.
Zotero
Zotero is a citation management software, which helps you collect, organize, and retrieve citations while you research. They store all the information needed to cite your research according to your manual of style. Citation management software can also work with programs like Microsoft Word and Open Office to insert properly formatted citations, citations, and bibliographies into your work.
Citation software can help you keep track of all of your sources and can also make it much easier to create bibliographies and integrate citations.
Below, you will find a series of tutorial that will help you navigate installing and using Zotero for your assignments.
Zotero Tutorials
The Library also has a number of additional resources on using Zotero.
September 23 - In-Class Workshop
You can work in Pairs or Groups of 3.
This activity is help you start researching for your final essay and possibly find some articles that you might end up using for your assignment, plus get practice using Zotero to organize your research and citations.
Your Objectives:
- Log-into Zotero and set it up on your computer.
- Using one or more of the Sociological databases, look up articles on a topic that interests you and might want to use for your final assignment. This can also be an opportunity to explore articles to help you find a topic to write about.
- Find one or two articles on a topic and add them to Zotero
- Practice creating bibliographic entries and in-text citations
Your librarian will circulate and answer any questions you may have.