Communication: PhD & Masters

Actively participating in your education is a strong way to endure and make it to the finish line.  The goal of this guide is to give you some of the tools that can mitigate anxiety and confirm & validate your place in the academic world.  

The academic library has many services and resources not listed herein.  Please do contact me for an appointment or just e-mail questions.  it is my work to help you with yours!- at dale.larsen@utah.edu.

Validating Keywords and Concepts with Text Mining and Background Info
Finding just the main ideas and context helps frame your own reasearch ideas -make a point of recording jargon, technical terms, names, populations, etc.  

Library Catalog (look in books -and sort by date-newest -how do they organize the topics in the table of contents?)

CQ Researcher (What is important to U.S. voters right now: Brief)
CQ Magazine (What is important to U.S. voters right now: Long Form)

Nexis Uni (news, law, business, people)
US Newsstream (newspapers all across the U.S. -lots of local info, opinion, policy commentary)

How to Stay Current & Discipline-Specific Research
(note: these are a mix of scholarly and non-scholarly -take care)
Use these to discover articles in specific social science disciplines that work well for your topic (or aspects of the problem or solutions presented).  These can contribute to your literature review, so document your searches and download good results.

Communication & Mass Media Complete (great!)
Communications & Mass Media Collection (some overlap with above, but worthwhile)
More...

Sociological Abstracts (sociology & social work -one of my favorites)
PsycINFO (psychology, but with many applications in social sciences)
Education Full Text & ERIC (education, family development)
Business Source Premier (business)
EconLit
PAIS (public policy and analysis)
Worldwide Political Science Abstracts (politics)
Engineering Village (many STEM disciplines)
Medline (medical professions/disciplines)

Good mix of disciplines (generic)
Academic Search Ultimate (was: Premier) (big mash of everything)
​Library Catalog: USearch (everything -highly recommended)
JSTOR (classic and mostly scholarly -search through the complete run of a particular journal -lots of historic backfiles)

Research Databases Directory (For a full list of Communication Databases)

Media & Meta Searching (Digital Humanities Lite)
(note: these are a mix of scholarly and non-scholarly -take care)
Use these to discover articles in specific social science disciplines that work well for your topic (or aspects of the problem or solutions presented).  These can contribute to your literature review, so document your searches and download good results.

Library catalog

Women's Magazine Archive (indexing of advertising is great)
Vogue archive (no adverts, but a complete run of the publication)

Historic newspapers Chicago Defender, LA Times, NY Times, WSJ and others

Hathi Trust  |  Google ngrams

JSTOR

Film & Video
(note: these are a mix of scholarly and non-scholarly -take care)
Use these to discover articles in specific social science disciplines that work well for your topic (or aspects of the problem or solutions presented).  These can contribute to your literature review, so document your searches and download good results.

Alexander Street Video - A cross searchable database that provides access to all the video databases from Alexander Street the Marriott Library subscribes to.

American History in Video - A video collection related to the study of American history, with over 2,000 hours commercial and governmental newsreels, archival footage, public affairs footage, and documentaries.

Europeana, Europe's Multimedia - A collection of the digital resources from Europe's museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections including newspapers, radio broadcasts, and videos such as films, newsreels and TV broadcasts

Films on Demand - This database provides access to a large collection of educational films which can be streamed online. 

And more...for a full list visit the Research Databases tab and limit database type to "videos"
High Level Systematic Search Tools
(note: these are typically the high-end of academic scholarship)

Scopus  AND Web of Science -Amazing/Awesome databases, all scholarly:
            tip 1: select "social sciences & humanities" at the search page (unchecking the others).
            tip 2: Do a search and in the results, click "cited by" as the sorting option (right-hand side).  The most cited, most influential articles will now appear at the top.

Google Scholar (fun discovery too, not always complete, but a worthwhile additional place to use)

Scholarly Publishing Resources

Proquest Dissertations & Theses Global  That's a mouthful of a title for the place to see the past 20 years of dissertations on topics ranging from Social Isolation to Radiohead.  Test out your ideas here -have they been written extensively, are there formatting ideas you hadn't considered, do you want to see successful research models? 

UlrichsWeb Global Serials Directory  Find publications you want more information about, like competitors, author guidelines and all that good stuff.

Primary sources are those bits and pieces made up of photographs, diaries, oral histories, interviews, unpublished manuscripts, letters and so on.  Many of these collections are housed in libraries around the world and are waiting for that context, or to be joined with other stories and important narratives that communities share in their collective identity.  

NOTE!: Your first stop for items like this and a whole lot more is Special Collections here at the Marriott Library

Marriott Library Digital Items (from ours and other Utah collections)

The Digital Public Library of America
ArchiveGrid
Library of Congress Digital Collections
Flickr Commons
google searches (put in your own keywords):
oral history:viet nam
oral history:tejano
diary:topaz
diary:climate protest

Learning Objectives

At the end of the library class, students should be able to:

1. Use library resources to validate research they have already done

2. Use library resources to stay current and perform discipline-specific research

3. Know systematic search strategies with advanced library databases Scopus and Web of Science
4. Effectively use library resources for creating and publishing their own research

Dale's starter kit for engaging with complicated literature:

First Stop: Library Research:
As you find articles that you think are relevant, 
   download the article (get that full text and save it)
   get a small amount of citation information (title, journal, etc.)
   read the first page or so and write a sentence about what the article is saying
   find a quote that agrees with the sentence you wrote

Second Stop: Synthesis
After you have a list of articles, try to put them into a cohesive order where each article contributes to a greater narrative or point.  This can be helped greatly by a chaotic mind map where you try to tie concepts to each other into a greater whole

(Dale's sample is not the only way to do it, but it is one way that works for me :-)

MLA (or other) Style gettin' you down?  Here's my top picks for 'Citation Management':

NoodleTools
(how to use NoodleTools)

EndNote Basic
(how to use EndNote Basic)
 

Zotero
(how to use Zotero)

Graduate Reading Room Your own quiet paradise -get your ID access set up at the West Entrance to the Library

Graduate Student Writing Center You have your own consultants, and some are housed in the reading room mentioned above.

Statistics Help (e-mail link -just ask for an appointment, or send a question) A graduate student in statistics is ready to consult with you about churning through that pile of data

Working with Librarians can be very helpful, this is a list of many of their subject specialties -do a search for your general interest

Saint Louis University has a great list of journals that primarily focus on qualitative research -take a look at the list and see if there's a journal in your field of interest -then look for that journal in the library, and find inspiration by seeing what others have done.