Professional Skills Development for Masters Students/Doctoral Students

• Planning a literature review: video (5:10) with tips on searching, analysing, and organizing sources for your literature review
• Generating research questions and keywords:
  • How to become a literature searching ninja (the Thesis Whisperer)
  • Developing a research question: for graduate students (a short, general video)
  • Healey, M. and Healey, R. L. (2015). "How to conduct a literature review," in Clifford, N.J. et al. (eds). (2015). Key methods in geography. London: SAGE Publications. (short chapter (6.4.4), available in Google Books)
  • White, P. (2009). Developing research questions : A guide for social scientists. Basingstoke [England] ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

• Omni: use to access print books and e-books; individual journals; best for scholarly books
  • 3 search scopes available: 1) Laurier Libraries; 2) Laurier+Waterloo+Guelph Libraries; 3) Laurier+Omni Libraries
  • Details on delivery times available here
• Databases: access to the greater “information ecosystem"; best to use for peer-reviewed articles
  • WLU Subject Databases
  • UW Research and journal Databases
• UW Special Collections & Archives/WLU Archives: for local “restricted” collections
• Interlibrary Loan (RACER): to request wide print materials outside Omni libraries; use for both books and journal articles
• NOTE: Some of these services are limited our unavailable due to Covid-19 pandemic

• AKA: Index, Thesaurus, list of Keywords, Subject Headings
• You need to identify centrally important concepts in your research area and create fixed definitions for them (Abbott, 2014)
• Assists you in searching, categorizing, analysis and write-up
• Especially important when doing systematic reviews or being careful in replicating research

Online Graduate Library Research Workshop: Introduction

2:30 How to contact
4:05 UW Geography Librarian contact information

Part 1.2: Academic Information Ecosystem    

Part 2.1: From Research Question to Search Strategy    

0:10 Topics
0:36 Research questions
1:05 Generating research questions and keywords
2:42 Research question example: mapping
6:53 Creating a research thesaurus/controlled vocabulary
10:04 How to create?

Part 2.2: Research Database demo    

0:03 controlled vocabulary search in ProQuest
2:33 controlled vocabulary results in Web of Science

Part 2.3 Creating a Controlled Vocabulary and Search Strategy

0:00 Intro

0:36 Thinking about concepts
2:08 Search example
2:15 Creating a search strategy
2:19 Purpose of a search strategy
3:42 Steps in creating a search strategy
5:27 Example
7:43 Documenting your research

Part 3.1: The Mechanics of Search

0:00 Introduction
1:05 Important caveat!
3:18 Boolean operators
6:19 Phrase searching
7:10 Wildcards and truncation
9:09 Keywords vs. Subject Headings
10:29 Limiters

Part 3.2: The Mechanics of Search, Examples    

0:06 Geobase
5:10 Web of Science
6:14 Omni outlier
7:20 Help in databases

Part 4.1: Managing your Information, Saving searches to a database    

0:24 Assumptions
0:47 Topics
1:54 Saving searches to a database
2:06 Saving searches in ProQuest
4:43 Saving searches in Geobase
5:10 Saving results in Web of Science

Part 4.2: Managing your Information, saving references to a database

0:19 Saving references in ProQuest
1:57 Saving records in Web of Science

Part 4.3: Managing your Information, saving references to a reference manager

0:05 Intro
0:42 Downloading records from Geobase
1:55 Saving records to Mendeley Reference Manager
5:29 Saving records to Zotero
8:10 Working with pdfs in Mendeley
10:35 Working with pdfs in Zotero

Part 4.4: Managing your Information, managing info with a reference manager

0:11 Managing information in Zotero
0:48 Removing duplicates in Zotero
2:06 Creating a bibliography in Zotero
3:31 Mendeley update
4:20 WLU Online workshops

Most databases:

• Use connectors (Boolean operators) to combine terms Watch our video Better Searching using AND, OR NOT
  • AND = use between search terms to retrieve ALL the words in each record
  • OR = use to search related terms/synonyms on the same topic
  • NOT = excludes words or phrases, but should be used judiciously
  • " " = phrase search, exact words in a particular order
  • * = truncation, searches for different forms of a word (variant spellings)
  • ? = wildcard, searches for variant spellings of one letter, e.g. colo?r searches for color, colour
  • Most databases have good "Help" resources on Boolean/Advanced searching; good to check these out before you start; they have advance features not discussed in detail in class

• Many databases, e.g. ProQuest; EBSCO, allow limit to peer-reviewed articles by check box
• Other databases, e.g. Web of Science, Scopus, Geobase, do not have peer-reviewed check box limiter
  • In this case, you should limit results to "Articles" on the left side menu; this usually removes non-peer-reviewed materials such as conference proceedings, chapters, book reviews, opinion articles, and letters to the editor
• If in doubt whether an article is from a peer-reviewed journal
  1. Use Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory - do a title search and look for the "referee" symbol
  2. Visit the web site of the journal, check their "About" section to determine if it is peer-reviewed, and what the process is
• For a definition and discussion of "predatory journals" see Grudniewicz, A., Moher, D., Cobey, K. D., Bryson, G. L., Cukier, S., Allen, K., ... & Lalu, M. M. (2019). Predatory journals: no definition, no defence. Nature 576, 210-212. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03759-y

• Journal Impact Factor: from InCites Journal Citation Reports, through Web of Science
• Eigenfactor: alternate metric showing "article's importance to the scientific community" from Eigenfactor.org
• SciMago Journal and Country rank: publicly available portal showing journals and country scientific indicators developed from information in the Scopus database

• Getting started with Zotero (video)
• Using Mendeley's plug-in for Word (video)
• Using Zotero's plug-in for Word (video)
• Zotero or Mendeley: which one is best? (video)