Methodology Handbooks

New Handbooks in Methodology from Sage Publications

As I've mentioned before, the library is trying to develop a strong methodology collection and get it used! Peter Malanchuk, our Librarian for Political Science, and Colleen Seale and Michael Dietz, both from the Reference Department, are collaborating with me to determine what reference materials and circulating books would enlighten students and faculty most during those dark moments of HUH?? or just the grayish ones.

Sage Publications has a well-earned reputation for producing some of the very best methodology handbooks. They are where I turn when I want to develop our collection. We also chose these texts because the articles include case studies from all over the social sciences: from political science to communication, psychology to television. Check out the Table of Contents. Pretty impressive.

Recently, Peter and I requested feedback on sets that reprinted "benchmark" articles about issues on particular methodologies. We already have a few of the sets:

Ethnography / edited by Alan Bryman. Table of Contents
The American tradition in qualitative research / edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln. Table of Contents
Conversation analysis / edited by Paul Drew & John Heritage. Table of Contents


They are all going into reference, so you'll be able to get at them when you need them. Faculty members can assign readings from them. They have wonderful reference lists after each article which should lead you to other readings.

From consulting the suggestions from faculty and the requests we get from students, we've decided to buy the following sets:

Measurement / edited by David Bartholomew Table of Contents
Research Design / edited by David de Vaus Table of Contents
Evaluation Research Methods / edited by Elliot Stern Table of Contents

Several faculty members asked for the Measurement texts and students are often confused about how and why they should use certain tests and inventories. Research Design was also requested and is broad, addressing very general issues confronted by most researchers.

Thank you for you assistance and let me know what other books we can gather together for you!

NPR Transcripts in LexisNexis

Searching Sources in LexisNexis -- Organic Peaches in California Depends on Immigration Reform

Last week, during spring break, I was driving home to my family in South Carolina. It was Saturday evening. I was listening to NPR and something interesting came on the radio. "Hmm," I thought. That would make a nice topic to build a blog around."

A week later, I can't remember a thing about the story. Was it about children? Something about demographics? Shoot.

When I got back to the library, I realized I could look in LexisNexis to find the transcript from NPR and figure out what I was listening to. (I could have done this from my parents' home using the VPN, but I was busy crocheting and finding furniture in junk stores.)

LexisNexis includes news sources from all over the world, including articles from newspapers, transcripts from television and radio, book and film reviews, and reports from the newswires. But on Monday morning I wanted to know what I'd been listening to on NPR, so I went to the library's home page and clicked on databases in the first column. In the second box on the databases page, I typed in LexisNexis. There are several different parts to LexisNexis -- the one that contains the news is LexisNexis Academic. (There are no scholarly works in here. I think it's called "Academic," because it's marketed to academic libraries. Yeah.)

LexisNexis will open to this screen:Click on the "Guided News Screen" tab at the top. (If you want to search all news sources, you can use this screen.)

On the next screen, choose, News Transcripts from the first dropdown menu, and National Public Radio Transcriptions from the second dropdown menu:

Notice that you can also get transcripts from the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, the Official Kremlin Intnl News Broadcast, and CNBC/Dow Jones Business Video among others. If you look at all of the drop down menus from the first box and their secondary dropdown menus (i.e., the second dropdown menu changes depending on the first menu) you'll find an amazing variety of sources. Enjoy!

Then, to find the report I was listening to, I remembered that I drove from about noon til 7pm on Saturday. The earlier time I listened to audio books. So I must have been listening to All Things Considered. My search looked like this (Note "all things" in the "show" field):And the results:
There it is! A peach farmer in California talking about the need for large numbers of workers to support organic farming. He sees legalizing immigration from Mexico as the only way to make delicious tasting peaches.

However, as I look at the list of transcripts, I realize that I must have started listening after the reports on the large numbers of child abuse cases reported by juveniles in institutions in Texas and across the United States. Hmm...many interesting articles...

(If you use LexisNexis to search newspapers, you can search just the Miami Herald by choosing U.S. News in the first box, Florida New Sources in the second, and Miami Herald in the very bottom box: StepFive: search this publication title.)

Thesauri and Search Terms

What Words to Search With? Keywords, Subject Terms, Thesauri

Many of my consultations start with this question. "I've looked and looked for stuff. But I just don't know the right words to use. How do I find them?" (Even before the student tells me what they're looking for...)

A lot of times, students are really just looking in the wrong database. A very general database, a database they're comfortable with because they used it before. Or perhaps in Google and their topic isn't too Googleable. Check on our Subject Guides. Or talk with a Librarian about the various databases.

UF Librarians have put together an excellent tutorial on how to analyze your question and develop search terms and a search strategy using your own mind.

But a big part of the problem with searching is that you're really trying to get out of your own mind and trying to figure out how other people are describing things. How authors and other researchers are describing what you are looking for. And how librarians and database designers are indexing and organizing articles.

So here are some ideas about using other people's minds to help you.

• Read subject specific encyclopedia and handbook articles on the topics you're interested in. Scour them for words that you hadn't thought of.
• Talk with anyone you can corral -- especially other students and faculty members (ply them with coffee or chocolates). Make note of how they talk about your topic.
• Use the thesaurus for the database you're searching:

There are a couple of ways to do this. And databases and interfaces vary in how good they are at this. But the idea is that you type in the words you're thinking of, and they give you words that they use to describe the same things. (Duh.) They'll usually give you the definition they use and other words that describe a broader concept; those that describe narrower; and others that are related. Check out the tutorial on PsycINFO's thesaurus.

If you are in Ebsco, using PsycINFO, GBLT Full Text, or Academic Search Premier, you can use the Visual Search or the regular search to see what the most common subject terms are in the articles you find. In the regular search, the most common subject terms will come up on the left hand side of the results screen:Click on image to enlarge

In CSA databases, like LLBA or Sociological Abstracts, the subject terms appear next to the results of individual articles.

If there isn't enough room to show all of the terms, you can look at the whole article. The nice thing about the CSA database, is that when you find an article that looks good, you can select a couple of the terms that describe it, and the database will search using them together for you. (Don't choose all of them. Usually the whole set only describes that one article.)

So with this article, since I wanted to look at "how people listen to verbs in a sentence" and used the keywords "sentence processing" and verbs, I might choose complements and syntactic processing. And later verbs and syntactic processing.Click to enlarge image

The more you read and chat, more terms you'll come upon. Visit me and we can talk and read together! Collaboration helps more than you can imagine. Take care!

Databases, Indexes, Print and Online

Recently 2 graduate students asked me if online databases would find print journals articles as well as electronic ones. And, they wanted to know, would they find articles that weren't in their own database. "Would Sociological Abstracts find journals that weren't full-text in Sociological Abstracts?" That was pretty ironic, since Sociological Abstracts actually contains no full-text journals.

"Huh?" you say. "I found an article that was online from SA just yesterday." Yeah. Sort of.

This explanation might bore you to tears (which is why we rarely tell anyone). On the other hand, it might clear up everything in the world for you.

Here's my beautiful diagram:
The first two boxes under the main database box show that some databases only index journals and articles, but don't have full text themselves. In our fields, these are the databases used most often, like LLBA, Sociological Abstracts, and PsycINFO.

You look through these databases for articles of interest. If you find one, our software, called SFX uses DOIs (digital object indicators -- links directly to articles) to find the ARTICLES we have access to through other databases. Sometimes articles don't have DOIs or our SFX database isn't up to date. Then you can follow the link to our catalog where wel list whether we have print copies of the journal or whether we subscribe to the e-journal for any period. (It doesn't tell you if we have the particular ARTICLE there.) If we have subscribe to some period of time (through any database), it will link to our database of e-journals and then to the database where the journal is. You need to look for the article there.

Other databases only contain full text journals -- most of these are publisher's databases or Open Access databases. In the Social Sciences you generally don't use these to look for articles. They are basically archives of journal articles. Generally, you use SFX or serial solutions to provide links between the indexing databases and the archiving databases.

But there are other databases. Like Academic Search Premier or Gale's OneFile. These have journals from lots of different publishers. The database indexes all kinds of articles, scholarly and popular, from all different fields -- science, social science and humanities. Some is full text, some are just citations.

So you can look up citations to full text or print in almost any index and find full text and print articles there. Link to them. Link to the library catalog. Pretty much just play around for as long as you'd like. I hope this made some sense and was a bit interesting to you...

Alerts from Databases

Alerts to New Publications from Your Favorite Databases and Journals

In Graduate School, I was wicked jealous of a post-doc's doctoral days at MIT. Her cognitive science librarian would send her newly published articles to stimulate my friend's scholarly curiosity. The librarian did this not only for my friend, but for the entire faculty and graduate student population of her department

Well, life has changed. The library faculty has shrunk and the number of our liaison departments has grown. At the same time, however, electronic databases and e-journals have stepped in to send you alerts every time a new article is published that you might like.

How does it work? Well, after you decide on the appropriate database and the best search terms, save a search, and then you can have the database run that search for you every so often (usually, you decide the time period). E-journals will usually run the search after each issue is published. In your email, you receive an update or alert about the new articles published after your last search.

So, if you are awaiting the article of your favorite author, you can save an author search. Have the database automatically run it and then email the results to you.

For an explicit example, check out the tutorial about setting up an alert in CSA databases like Sociological Abstracts, Social Services Abstracts or LLBA or the one about setting up an alert in EBSCO databases like PsycINFO, Academic Search Premiere, or GLBT Life Full Text.

Tests & Measures in PsycINFO

Find Tests, Measures and Inventories in PsycINFO

Another tip about finding Tests and Measures. When you get into PsycINFO, type in the domain of interest to you in the search box -- say, body image.

Then go to the Refine Search section below. Scroll down to the box "Classification Codes." Click on the selections

• 2200 Psychometrics & Statistics & Methodology
• 2220 Tests & Testing

(Use control from your keyboard and click with the mouse to click on both options.) This should bring up articles that have a strong focus on Tests and Measures in your field.

Here are the results from the Body Image search:
(Click on the picture to enlarge it.)
(I was thrilled to find out that this actually worked!)

Tests and Measures in the Social Sciences

Looking for Tests, Measures, and Inventories in the Library? Here's an Index

Every week someone e-mails me wanting tests and inventories hoping to measure everything from anxiety to the quality of the relationship between people who work together.

A wonderful librarian, named Helen Hough, at Central Library at the University of Texas at Arlington indexed over 100 compilations that include tests, measures and inventories. It's set up as a live database, so you can type in the name (or subject) of the test you're interested in, and you'll get a list of results. Click on the one that looks most promising. Not only will you get a citation of the book, you'll also be told how much of the test is included.

So, for instance, if you're looking for the Acute Panic Inventory, type it in, plus "compilation volumes" as above. Then get Google results: (Click on the pictures to enlarge them.)

In this case, click on the link -- it's for the Acute Panic Inventory. And this is the result you'll get. It says that the entire test is included. And also lists all of the other tests included in the book.
Sajatovic M & Ramirez LF (2001). Rating scales in mental health. Hudson, OH: Lexi-Comp. [62 instruments] UTA Location & call number (There's a link to look up the book in their library. It's nice for them, but not so helpful for us :-( If we don't have it, just ask to borrow it through ILL.

So just look up the book in our library catalog to see if we have it. In this case, it's at the Health Center Science Library (the Medical School Library) and can be checked out. Pretty cool! Made me happy when I found it.

[I'm delighted to add that Ms. Hough commented that there is "a lot more stuff in Refshare." That's the link above the Quick Search box. In that database she and her colleagues use RefWorks to gift us with even more information about the locations of tests and measures. When you get into Refshare, you can search for what you'd like by using the dropdown list under Search on the very left-most bit of the menu at the top of the page. (Choose Advanced -- That gives you the most options.) Again, enjoy yourselves!]

I mention the details about Ms. Hough because she has performed such a service to all of us. Thank you Ms. Hough. Thank you so much. You have already helped two of the librarians at the University of Florida within 2 days of finding out about your index. We grovel in thankfulness.

Journals in Print

Yes. Some Journal Articles are Only Available in Print. Still.

Some journals have yet to go online. Others haven't put their older files (backfiles in librarian lingo) online. In other cases, we've decided that buying duplicate sets in electronic format is an unwise use of our funds. Therefore, expect to need to look for some journals in print.

Recently, many students have asked me how to look for journal articles in print. Here is a lovely tutorial. Remember you have to search for the title of the journal, not the article in the library catalog.

Using Google, Using the Web

Harvard's Guide to Using Google for Research

In a previous entry, I mentioned Google Scholar, but I failed to mention Google in general. As Harvard University's library states in its wonderful guide to using Google for research, the web hosts many useful resources for academic purposes, especially to find statistics and demographics. Authoritative labor, criminal justice, child abuse, and mental health statistics are all available from governmental and NGO websites.

However, it's important to sift through information and websites carefully. That's where Harvard University's guide is especially helpful.

Our library also suggest Internet Resources. And each Subject Guide includes internet resources, as well.

RefWorks

Download Citations Even from Google Scholar!

I tell you, some days libraries, the Internet, computers, software, and research just gets so exciting, I don't know how we can manage not to smile from ear to ear every minute. (Oh. Right. We read what the research says. Oops.)

Anyway, the library subscribes to RefWorks, citation management software that is online. Faculty, staff, and students can use it to keep records of books, journals articles, webpages, videos/DVDs, and just about anything else we use for research. Because the records are online, you don't need to worry about your harddrive getting corrupted, your laptop being stolen, or your card file catching on fire.

RefWorks has tutorials to help you set up your work. You can use RefWorks to organize your reading (and writing) in different folders, print out Works Cited pages in hundreds of bibliographic styles, and download searches directly from databases. It's downright amazing.

And now, you can download searches, or at least individual citations, directly from Google Scholar. Keffer Library at the University of St. Thomas has a very nice tutorial that shows you how to set your preferences in Google Scholar so you can download to RefWorks. (You can also download into other Citation Management software like EndNotes or ProCite, if you use those.)

By the way, Google Scholar searches scholarly journals and links directly to full text articles. It's quite nice. One drawback...We don't know which journals it searches. It does NOT search ALL of our journals. And many of the journals it searches we do NOT subscribe to. But we do have SFX linking, so you can see which we subscribe to electronically and which we have print subscriptions to. Use it. You'll like it!

e-Journal Articles

Finding e-Journal Articles from Databases

Are you in the middle of a search for articles and wonder why so few are full-text in your database? There must be more than 5 articles online about eating disorders! Golly!

Well, the UF Libraries subscribe to over 600 databases, most with full text articles that you can read in the comfort of your own bed without having to visit the library. (But we like you, so come visit occasionally. And...we have good chairs.)

If you are in one database, like Sociological Abstracts, but the article you want is in another database, JSTOR, clicking on the SFX button next to the citation will guide you to the full-text article. To see how to do this in more detail, look at the tutorial showing the steps.

On the other hand, if you know a journal you're interested in, from the Library's home page, look under the Find column (the 2nd column) and click on Journals. In the first box, type in the title of the journal you'd like:

Say, I'd like to get an article from Language from 2004.


The fourth record is for Language. You want an article from 2004, so Project Muse, not JSTOR, will have the article You want. So click on the link for Project Muse, browse through the listings there and find the article you want.

Of course, UF still owns some journals only in print. Print journals in Library West are on the 3rd Floor. Lots of journals for Psychology or Communication Science and Disorders, especially, are at the Health Science Center Library. Several Sociology Journals are at the Legal Information Center (Law School Library). The Education Library holds journals for all areas.

Many older journals are in storage or in microform. Use the online request form to request them.

Citation Searching

Citation Searching: Finding Articles into the Future

One of the neatest databases available is Web of Science. If you have hung out in academia long enough, you might remember it as Social Sciences Citation Index. Each year, published as 3 or 4 hefty volumes. (Only for the Social Sciences edition. Every year there was also a Science edition and an Arts & Humanities edition, each having its own 3 or 4 volumes.)

Each volume, a weighty tome, with thin transulescent pages and the most minute printing possible. Scholars over a particular age might need to use a magnifying glass to scan down the columns of print. But it was a treasure trove. And the only way to find out what had been published AFTER. After the perfect article exactly on the topic you were interested in, but published 15 years ago. Surely someone had published since? How else could you look into the future from that article to today? Who else was publishing on the same topic? Perhaps the persons who had cited that perfect article.

Many databases, such as PsycInfo or Sociological Abstracts, allow "Times cited in the database," "Cited by" or similar possibilites. However, the "cited by" articles have to be in the same database. The Web of Science is multidisciplinary, including articles from over 22,000 journals, compared with just 2,000 journals covered by PsycInfo and 1,800 by Sociological Abstracts.

Web of Science also has a nice online tutorial to guide you through citation reference searching. Besides Overview, make sure you also click on, and read Cited Reference.

Another special feature of Web of Science: you can search for Related Records, meaning other articles that include the same citations in their Reference Lists. Web of Science assumes that if 2 articles share References, they're probably on the same topic. The more references they share, the closer the subject matter. When you click on the "Related Articles" link, articles are ranked by the number of shared references.

(Sometimes this is a bit wacky. I saw an article with 204 references. The original article listed 34 references. Even though the overlap included 7 papers, they were probably only rated highly related, because the 2nd article had so many references.)

Click on picture to enlarge

One cool feature not mentioned in the tutorial: you can analyze the citations to find out WHO is citing the article. Are the authors the only scholars who cite this article? Is there a small circle of scholars who cite this article, all from the same institutions as the author? Is the author internationally read? Has the article been cited continually since its publication or just for the following 2 years? Or has the article been recently picked up again after lying dormant for 15 years?

To use the ANALYZE feature, find the citations to the article you're interested in, then click on the analyze button next to the listed articles:

Click on picture to enlarge

And then choose how you want to rank the citing articles and how you want to sort the fields. (If you rank by date, sort by "selected fields." That way you'll get the results along a time line, instead of when the most papers were published, e.g., 1984, 1996, 1985, 1986, 1995, etc.)

Click on picture to enlarge

However, there are a few problems.The worst is that the citations are lifted directly from the references in the back of articles and books, meaning that there are many errors in the database. Expect to find errors of authors' names, publication dates, page and volume numbers, journal titles, etc. There are some guides to help you with this, but it is a definite problem.

The second problem is that you can really play for days in here, wandering around a winding road, leading off into lands of great interest that can distract you from your major focus. It might help to keep your topic statement somewhere nearby for those days when you absolutely have to get your work done and have no time for those more enticing bits of research play.

Good luck. Have fun. And contact me if you'd like some help or more information!

EBSCOHost & Visual Search

Academic Search Premiere and PsycINFO: A New Visual Search Interface

EBSCOhost changed its interface over the summer, adding an optional "visual search." (The traditional search is still the default, but EBSCOhost has added other features to their traditional search that will also help you.)

The visual search groups articles by subject into a visual map, making it easier to see what you've found at a glance. So if you search for "depression and aging," you might get a result looking like this:

With a traditional search you get a long list of articles, requiring you to browse through pages and pages, looking for what you want. Or you have to know exactly what you want before you start. It's hard to find articles serendipitously.

Get to the visual search page by clicking on the "visual search" tab at the top of the page.

Now you can see your results all at once and get an idea of what all the different articles are about. The circles are sets of articles on a particular topic, as are the spheres inside them. The boxes inside the circles are individual articles.

• Roll over the boxes, circles, or spheres and you'll get more information about them: their subject terms, their titles, their authors, the journals.
• Double-click on the the circles or spheres and you'll burrow down another level.
  
• Double-click on a box and the article's record, including the abstract, will open on the right side of the page.
  
• If you want the record to take up the entire page, just click on the arrows in the middle.
  
• You can click on the SFX button to find the e-journal article or check our library catalog for print articles.
  

It's pretty cool!As usual, let me know if you'd like more information about the interface. If you'd like me to show this to you, your class, your lab, your pet alligator, I'm happy to meet with you.

Especially important: if you use the visual search, let me know if you like it, hate it, find it silly, or the easiest interface you've ever used.