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Arts 140: Irrational Economics: Locating articles

Locating Quality Sources

Step 1 – Identifying key terms

  • Start by listing keywords that best describe your topic. These may be single terms (example: media) or phrases (example: “social media”). Consider synonyms and out-dated terms as well. 
  • You will use these terms to craft your catalogue, database or search engine query in Step 3 

Topic: Impact of standing desks 

Research Question: Do standing desks reduce the occurrence of high blood pressure in adults?

Concept 1 (Population) Concept 2 (Intervention/Theory) Concept 3 (Comparison) Concept 4 (Outcomes/Effect/Phenomena)
Middle-aged adults who work at a desk Standing desk Sitting; stability ball; treadmill desk high blood pressure

Worker(s)

Adult(s)

Employee(s)

Labo(u)r

Labo(u)rers

Sit-stand desk

Standing workstation

Sit-stand workstation

Standing

Sitting

Sit; Sitting; Seated

stability ball; Bosu Ball

treadmill desk

chair

Hypertension

Low blood pressure

Blood pressure regulation

diastolic blood pressure

mean arterial pressure

Step 2 – Identifying what information is needed and where it is located

  • Identify the type of sources needed to gather research for your assignment.  This could include books, journals, data sets, newspaper articles, or other specialized sources.
  • Use a research guide or browse the Library’s Databases list to identify where the information you need is likely to be found. 

Step 3 – Creating and refining your search

  • Search using the key terms you identified
    • Are you result relevant are to your research question?
    • Are there too few or too many results?
  • Refine your search.  Consider:
    • Using synonyms you identified earlier.
    • Enclosing phrases in quotation marks.
    • Connect multiple keywords with AND, OR, NOT (Boolean operators). 
    • Using truncation symbols such as * (asterisk) to retrieve all variations of a search term (example: statistic* - search will retrieve statistics and statistical).
    • Using search filters or the advanced search function.
    • Selecting a different database. 
  • Record useful searches for use later

 

Databases

Databases are organized and searchable collections of information such as articles, newspapers, reviews, and datasets. Databases can be subject specific or multidisciplinary. Some Databases contain the full text of articles, while other are indexes and contain only data about the article, not the article itself. You will usually be able to find the full-text version in another resource. Use the Get full text or Get It @ Waterloo links to access the item's record in the Library catalogue (Omni) to identify full-text options.

To identify the top databases recommended for your discipline by Waterloo librarians, consult the Library's Research guides.

The Library’s Find an article page will help you learn to search for articles including accessing a database and downloading a full-text .pdf. 

Journals and articles can vary in quality.  See the Evaluating sources section for information on how to judge the quality of a source.

Recommended Database for this Course

Even though Scopus contains almost exclusively sources which are academic/scholarly and/or peer-reviewed and therefore, much of the evaluation work regarding accuracy and authority is already done, you will still need to think about relevancy, date, and reason for writing.

Search Statement Worksheet