Library Exercise

Note: This Exercise is pulled from another class.

Students in 01.505 do NOT have to complete it.

I am including it on our website for the benefit of those of you who have not conducted a literature review in recent memory; it is NOT required.

A.  Instructions 

Objectives

• To navigate the UML Library electronic database PsycInfo
• To create search commands using Boolean operators
• To identify empirical articles in peer-reviewed journals
• To request an article from Inter-Library Loan
• To become familiar with referring to an article by Author (date)

Part 1:  Logging in

• Log onto the UML Library website.  You may go to the www.uml.edu and find the Library from there
• Look at what you see.  Notice that there is a sidebar, Off Campus Users Login.  If you are working from anywhere other than a University of Massachusetts on campus computer terminal, you must click here.  On campus you are good to go to the next step.
• Enter your student e-mail address and password.
• Proceed to Find Articles  Select (a) topic: Psychologyàselect PsycInfo on the right or (b) Articles: Type in PsycInfo

Part 2:  Finding Articles using PsycInfo

• There are a number of ways to find articles, the most efficient database for psychology being PsycInfo.  Most journal based research in education is also covered in PsycInfo—ERIC has much information on education that does not appear in peer-reviewed journals and is not research.  So, for the purposes of the  mini-research review, PsycInfo is probably the most efficient database to use for your search.
• We’ll start with an AUthor search using yours truly.  Type in au arcus
• How many hits do you find?
• Scroll down and check them out.  Do you really think I would publish something called, The long-term ombudsman program: A social work perspective.  Nope.  That’s George (no relation as far as I know).
• So, select one of the articles that Arcus, Doreen authored by clicking on the title of any of them. 
• When you are on the detailed page for that article, you will see several categories of information, including the abstract, a valuable but brief summary of what the article does.  You will also see Author with the author’s name(s) hyperlinked.  Select Arcus, Doreen
• Now how many hits do you get?
• Think about what you have found.  All items that I have authored or co-authored in journals or book sources that are indexed by PsycInfo.  Items that have appeared in local newspapers won’t be there.  Chapters that I wrote for The Gale Encyclopedia of Childhood and Adolescence will not be there.  Unpublished conference presentations will not be there.  On the other hand, none of those are empirical journal articles. If you need to find any of the other items, you would have to change databases to something like Academic Search Premier (more general) or ERIC (resources in education) or Lexis-Nexus (news).  But we won’t worry about that. What is here is a as good representation of my published empirical work as you will find.

Part 3:  Boolean operators used here

• On to other searches.  Let’s find empirical studies in peer-reviewed journals on the topic of the influence of television on aggression in children. 
• You can choose any of those terms and type them in.  Begin with aggression.  As of the date I am typing this assignment, you should get about 26,248 hits. 
• Look them over.  Some are books, some dissertations, some chapters in books.  We want articles in Peer Reviewed Journals.  Find that tab and select it.  Today you would get 18,732 articles.
• Let’s limit it.  Try typing in the two other terms (children, television) as well and see what you get.  How many hits did you get?  Zero??  If so it is because the search engine looked for the exact phrase you typed (aggression children television). 
• Add the Boolean operator AND.  Type AND in between each search term.  Now how many hits did you get?
• Select the Peer Reviewed Journal tab. How many articles come up?
• Now we are in business—almost.  Limit the articles you have found by selecting the blue tab Refine Search. 
• Scroll down to Methodology and select Empirical Study and re-select Search. (If you choose reset, you will reset all the categories to the default, undoing the empirical studies selection that you just made.)
• Notice that a reminder appears √Limiters Set. You will now need to select Peer Reviewed Journal again.
• How many empirical articles have you found on the topic of aggression and children and television in peer-reviewed journals?

Part 4.  Selecting an article

• We will use two articles for this assignment and refer to them again later in the course (beginning next week).  So, you might want to save a copy of each of these articles to your computer.
• The first is Boyatzis, Matillo and Nesbitt (1995).  Find it and select Linked Full Text.  Save a copy of the article as you would save any document, by going to File and then selecting Save As… 
• Be sure to give your file names some title  that makes sense to you. I usually use the author and date, in this case, boyatzis_etal_1995.html
• The second is Rosenkoetter, Rosenkoetter, & Ozretich (2004).  Find it and select Linked Full Text.  Did you get the full text?  No.  Just the abstract. This is an annoying hiccough in the search system.  Full text is available, just not through the current database. 
• Go BACK and select the title of the article.  You will get the detailed information page.  Scroll down until you see Check LinkSource for more information. Select that option and wait a moment. 
• LinkSource will open in a new window and tell you that you can view that article through Science Direct.  Do so.
• Select the hyperlink to Science Direct.  The article will open in a new window in html format.  Since it is easier to save, read, and retrieve pdf files, and since this is an option, select PDF.
• To save the pdf file, be sure to select the disk icon in the grey pdf toolbar, just above the article on the far left.
• Read both of these articles.

Part 5.  Do not limit yourself to Full Text available.

• Take a look at the other articles that you found and select one that might be interesting, for example, Neto and Fuhrman (2005). 
• Submit a request for the full text of the article by opening another Library window (cntrl-n on windows machines), which will allow you to cut and paste information.
• On your new window, go to Interlibrary Loan and Virtual Catalogue sidebar
• You want to request a journal article using the ILL request form.  Select ILL request form
• Cut and paste information from the journal citation into the ILL Request form.  Submit it with a request to have the article sent to your e-mail address.  
• When you receive your article via e-mail, forward a copy of the e-mail to me at the course assignment e-mail address.

The Library Assignment Answer Sheet follows

B.  Answer Sheet

Name:

Date:

1.  How many hits did you get for …

au arcus

au arcus doreen

aggression AND children AND television

in total

in peer-reviewed journals

as empirical studies in peer-reviewed journals

Answer the following questions. You may use no more than one sentence for a, b, d and e.  You may use two for c.

2.  In the Boyatzis et al (1995) paper…

a) What was the authors’ main hypothesis? 

b) Who were the participants?

c) What were the experimental and control (comparison) conditions?

d) How did the authors measure the outcome?

e) What did the authors find?

3.  In Rosenkoetter et al (2004)

a) What was the authors’ main hypothesis? 

b) Who were the participants?

c) What were the experimental and control (comparison) conditions?

d) How did the authors measure the outcome?

e) What did the authors find?

4.   Please provide the authors and year of publication for the paper you requested from InterLibrary Loan.

End of Library Exercise