PSI BETA Research Project

Organize Your Research

When working as a group, you will need to share your information. There are a variety of ways that you can organize everything, but ultimately, you will need to figure out what will be easiest for everyone.

Here are some suggestions:

• Use Google Drive to create folders and documents that everyone in the group can access and edit.
• Create a document that outlines your search strategy. You can refer back to this document often and keep adding to it as needed.
• Include a durable URL or permalink to full-text resources found in databases in your list of resources for quick access. You can delete these URLs once you are ready to create your final reference list.

When you begin research for a project, you will typically start by reading background information on your topic. You may also need to look up definitions for various terms or concepts along the way.

Background information can help you . . .

• learn more about an unfamiliar topic
• identify important keywords and concepts
• narrow or expand your search
• find other resources on your topic

Search for Specific Articles

Many times you will have citation information for an article, but you will need to find the full-text so that you can actually read the article.

Your basic process for searching is to:

1. Search for the article in Summon.
2. If it's not in Summon, search the DOI using Google (or another search engine).
3. If the full-text is not available for free online, you will submit an interlibrary loan request.
4. ASK a librarian for help at any point. We love this stuff!

Summon Search

Advanced Search Options  |  Summon Help

Keyword Searching

Combine keywords and phrases with AND or OR:

• students AND college engagement AND self-concept
• (professor OR instructor OR teacher) AND "college student" AND relationship

Use quotation marks to search for an exact phrase.

Use the asterisk (*) to search for multiple forms of a word: teen* will find teen, teens, teenager, teenagers, etc.

Once you have a list of results, use the options in the side bar to refine your results by date, type of resource, subject, etc.

Subject Searching

Look for the subject terms and phrases used by the database to describe or categorize an article. These subjects are often available as hyperlinks that, when clicked, will run a new search and return results that fall under that subject heading or category.

Note: Summon subject terms may be different from individual databases (ProQuest, EBSCO, Gale, etc.).

Look for Subject Terms

Example from EBSCOhost's Academic Search Complete database:
Notice that the subject terms are listed just underneath the citation information.

Example from ProQuest Central:
In ProQuest databases, you have to click Preview, or look at the Abstract/Details tab to see the subject terms.