Hist 202: War Journalism: Research Tips
Tips for using Scholarly Resources
Scholarly articles? Peer-review?
You will be expected to know these terms and use these materials as part of your academic coursework, but what do they mean and how are you expected to use them?
Librarians from Wayne State University have created an excellent "crash course" to explain these concepts, which are key to completing successful academic research.
Created by librarians at Wilfrid Laurier University Library, this video explains:
- The benefits of turning a topic into a research question
- How to narrow a general topic into an inquiry of appropriate scope
- How to isolate important variables using the questions: Who? What? Why? When? How?
Elements from a strong research question can be used as search terms in later steps in this process.
Created by JSTOR, this video explains how to get started with:
- Basic search
- Advanced search
- Image search
Learn how to find what you need quickly, run a strong advanced search (even if you don't feel like an advanced user!), and save and organize your searches: How to Search JSTOR
Created by librarians at Santiago Canyon College Libraries, this video explains:
- How to select promising articles from a results list
- How to identify when articles are both on-topic and relevant to the project at hand
- How to evaluate articles for information important to your research
Created by librarians at Johns Hopkins' Sheridan Libraries, this video explains:
- (at 3:18) Structure and sections of scholarly articles in social sciences and sciences
- (at 6:28) Structure and sections of scholarly articles in the humanities
- (at 7:09) Strategies for reading scholarly articles
- (at 8:03) Reading and note-taking tips for scholarly articles
A student might meet with a librarian to discuss:
- Finding Resources: To get help locating books, articles, and other materials relevant to their research topic.
- Research Strategies: To learn effective search techniques and strategies for navigating databases and online resources.
- Citation Assistance: To receive guidance on properly citing sources and citation management strategies.
- Evaluating Sources: To get tips on assessing the credibility and relevance of sources.
- Narrowing Topics: To refine or narrow down a broad research topic into a more manageable scope.
- Developing Research Questions: To get help formulating strong, researchable questions.
- Using Library Services: To learn how to use specific library services, such as interlibrary loan.
Tips for using Google Scholar
Google Scholar uses keyword searching, much like other library databases. Rather than asking a question, we need to break our search into its main concepts, which become our search terms or keywords during our search. Taking a few minutes to think about our topic and its related keywords before we begin searching can save us time during the search process.
Devloping keywords
Try breaking down your question into it's basic parts.
Example Search: What are the impacts of social media on college student's mental health?
Keywords: Social Media, College, Mental Health
Think of Synonyms
Think of different ways to describe your keywords. Other authors may not use your exact words when writing about your topic. What are some other words that someone might use to discuss your idea?.
| Keywords | Related Terms |
| Social Media | TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat |
| College | University, Higher Education, Undergraduate Students |
| Mental Health |
Mental Illness, Depression, Anxiety |
Methods for Organizing Notes & Source Materials
-
The Note Card System (Gallaudet University)"When you are faced with starting a research paper, the most important part of researching and beginning to write is organizing the information and your thoughts. If you are not organized, it will take considerably more time to write the paper. To make it easy on yourself, you can use an index card system as you gather information. With this method, you categorize the information you find by topic. For each topic, you could have any number of cards from several different sources. Later, as you write your paper, each card topic becomes a body paragraph (supporting idea) in your paper."
Linking Google Scholar with MSMU Resources
What is Google Scholar?
Google Scholar is Google's academic search engine that searches across scholarly literature. It has extensive coverage, retrieving information from:
- academic publishers
- professional organizations
- university repositories
- professional websites covering all disciplines
Google Scholar can be a good place to start a search, helping to:
- Locate obscure references difficult to find in library databases
- Find more details on partial citations or incorrectly cited works
- Identify grey literature not often indexed elsewhere
- Discover useful journals or databases to explore in more detail
In the Settings menu on the left hand side, click on Library Links.
From here, search for Phillips Library and check and save all relevant options.
When you find a relevant article, Google Scholar will link to additional articles via:
Related articles: A list of similar articles and resources.
Cited by: A list of publications citing that article.
Both these links are available under every search result.
Google Scholar Library allows you to save and organize your own collection of articles within Scholar.
- Click 'save' below a search result to add it to your library.
- Click 'my library' to access your saved articles
- Can be linked to your Google Scholar Profile
Use operators to refine your search terms. Google Scholar also supports most of the advanced operators in Google web search:
- the "-" operator excludes all results that include this search term, as in [biomedicine -magnetic]
- phrase search only returns results that include this exact phrase, as in ["as you like it"]
- the "~" operator will find synonyms for that word, as in [~robotics]
- the "OR" operator returns results that include either of your search terms, as in [soccer OR football]
- the "intitle:" operator as in [intitle:mars] only returns results that include your search term in the document's title
- the "author" operator [author:flowers] returns papers written by people with the name Flowers, whereas [flowers -author:flowers] returns papers about flowers, and ignores papers written by people with the name Flowers
- using quotes around a common word makes sure your results include common words, letters or numbers that Google's search technology generally ignores, as in ["the" border]
Starter Search Terms
The topics you choose will largely guide the search terms you use when searching for reference materials, however, there are some similar terms that can be applied across multiple topical areas as they relate to War Journalism. Keep in mind, when choosing search terms, we want to use the words and phrases that other historical works are categorized by, usually these are called Subject Headings, or Subject Terms. Subject Headings are standardized across publications, making it easy to use a common term or phrase to search multiple publications.
Below is a short list to help you begin your research.
- war correspondents
- embedded reporter / embedded war correspondents
- journalism military
- mass media and public opinion
- television broadcasting of news
- war press coverage
- television and the war
- [name of conflict] press coverage
- [name of conflict] journalists
- war films
- war in mass media
- press and journalism in literature
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