Communication: PhD & Masters

This guide accompanies a class lecture, so if you would like a tour of this index, please reach out to dale.larsen@utah.edu -he is delighted to help your research!

ONE: 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 -A faculty favorite!)
US Newsstream (newspapers all across the U.S. -lots of local info, opinion, policy commentary)

TWO: 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 (theory and comm-specific disciplinary work -many of the databases below greatly supplement your research)

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)
CINAHL (health communication in the context of Nursing research)

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

THREE: 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.
 

Surveys and Polls (and samples for survey design)
Roper iPoll (library database)
Pew Research Center (open web)

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"

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

Archives
Over the recent past years, small local primary source collections and huge national archive collections are being digitized.
National Library of Korea (note, there is a Korean language link at this site)

Korean Collection at the Library of Congress 

Jikji OR 직지, held at the Bibliothèque Nationale, France (the oldest moveable type printing process originated in Korea and is held, in part, by the government of France)

Korea Statistics (Kosis.KR) demographic data, but also surveys, polls, and results!

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)