Finding and using information

Introduction to the participants and give an outline of the session. Emphasise that this session will allow students to think about their own work and put into practice some of the techniques and strategies discussed. Session outline:

Throughout we will be using this research topic as our example when demonstrating resources. Students should be encouraged to think about and relate this to their own assignment topic:

What?

Spending a little extra time considering your plan of action will save you a lot of time (and effort) in the long run. To create a search strategy we take our research question or questions and identify the key concepts or terms that make up the question. We then think about the other ways these ideas might be described before considering alternative spellings or endings.

What are the keywords or concepts within our example question? Once we have identified those we can start thinking about synonyms and related concepts. Ask ourselves — how might another author describe these ideas? Are there any alternative terms for some of the technical concepts in our question?

Activity — spend 5 minutes talking to each other and coming up with alternatives for the terms we have identified. (Use printed version of slide 9).

The ‘Planning ahead’ online resource can help you carry out this process with your own research questions.

Frameworks

Within the health sciences, searches are frequently planned using a search framework. ‘PICO’ is an example of such a framework and is best used when looking for evidence based literature:

Population; Intervention; Comparison; Outcome

Next we will look at some of the search resources available to you and discuss how and why you might use them.

Library Search

Library Search is our main search tool. It searches both our physical and electronic resources and makes it easy to access electronic resources away from campus. It also allows you to save the things you found — either within your Library account or using referencing tools.

Subject databases

There are a range of Subject Guides available on the Library website which put core resources in one central place. Sometimes it may be useful to visit other Subject guides as well as your own if you are researching a multi-disciplinary area — we might for example want to consider the pharmacological or care aspects to our topic, as well as the medical. You can find the subject resources through My Manchester and the Library homepage.

You can get more out of subject specific databases by considering how you combine your terms. Our resource, ‘Search operators’ can help you to do that.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is exactly what it sounds like — Google’s search tool for scholarly sources. Its advantages are its ease of use and speed in returning results. It’s disadvantages are the lack of control one has in filtering results.

The search cycle

Don’t worry if you are not finding lots of relevant literature straight away — searching for high quality information is not a linear process. Note how authors describe the ideas you are interested in and add those terms to your search strategy. Follow up the references to find where interesting ideas came from and use the ‘cited by’ link on Google Scholar to find papers building upon ideas you are interested in.

Show your readers: what you have read; where ideas you discuss have come from; where quotations you use have come from; how you have arrived at your own conclusions.

We can also provide support and advice with uses reference management tools. These tools are great way of keeping track of your reading and make it quick and easy to reference in your work.

You will find the My Learning Essentials online resources we have mentioned today in your Blackboard space. There are lots more resources on our website, as well as workshops you can attend and drop in one-to-one sessions.

Any questions?

Sconul question and wrap up.

Internal ID: R19–0574

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