ISU Library Basics 

The Olin*Kroch*Uris Libraries and Cornell University Library provide a useful diagram of the relationship between primary, secondary, and tertiary literature. Page Two illustrates how to take advantage of this relationship to formulate a Search Strategy to dig down into your research topic.

What you are looking for can make a difference in where you should look. Different types of sources offer different information.

Books:
Books take about a year to be published. They will not include the latest studies and research. Textbooks and encyclopedias are good for basic information. Further editions of books demonstrate that a source has been updated to reflect new information and may be a standard source in the field. Are there newer editions available?

Reference Books:
Reference books, such as encyclopedias and dictionaries, collect accepted facts from the established literature. In health and science, they can be huge and may take years to put together. Therefore, they do not contain the most current information, although they may mention studies that were recent at the the time of publication. But they are a good one-stop-shop to start by learning the basics of a topic.

Journals:
The latest research is published in journals. It can be difficult to find basic information in journals. Nowadays, most journals have a web site that allows viewing of the table of contents and summaries of articles.

Databases:
Databases are very useful and efficient for searching through journals. Sometimes they include books, and other sources. Every database follows different rules for searching and storage. Effective use depends on knowing those rules. Commercial medical and science databases commonly provide only summaries of articles and do not include full text. They can be very expensive.

Planning your Research Strategy

You can use the Library Research Planner worksheet or the Assignment Calculator to help you plan your research.

Identify what your hypothesis or research topic is. What do you know about it? What are the common beliefs and facts known? What are the known treatments or care options?

In a literature review, you are attempting to find out what is known about your hypothesis or research topic. What do others know through research? What competing theories are available? What relevant research has been done? These are the beliefs and facts that will either support or refute your hypothesis. These are the arguments to which you must respond to validate your research.

So how do you find out what is known about a topic?

Get an Overview of your Topic. Start with a specialized dictionary, encyclopedia, handbook, textbook, guide, or bibliography to get a brief overview of your topic. Use these to get competing theories, definitions of subject specific terms, an historical perspective, a chronology of events, or useful bibliographic references.

Go to Library Homepage > More Resources > Online Reference Books by Type of Source 

Find a book about the topic to gather more information. Books are longer than encyclopedia entries and journal articles. They can tell you what is known about the topic in detail. They take about a year to be published so they will not include the latest information. That step will come next.

Go to Library Homepage > Books

ISU LIBRARY CATALOG

If you live on or near the ISU campus, you may want to search the Library Catalog and its collection of more than two million books, microforms, videos and journal titles.

A sample keyword search in the Library Catalog would be:

eating disorders [as a phrase] in the keyword anywhere field
AND
treatment? intervention [any of these] in the keyword anywhere field

Look for journal articles for the latest research. Journal articles are more current than books. They are also shorter and often contain information about only a specific portion of a broad topic. Journals are very important to scholarly research.

      The easiest way to find journal articles is to use the library databases. They have search engines that can be used to search for keywords, words in the title, author name, subject heading or other part of an article.

What kind of topic is it? This will affect your choice of appropriate sources to try.

Some sources may be more appropriate than others for these topics. If appropriate, don’t forget to check out the Business, Education, Psychology, or Sociology databases.

To find the most commonly used databases in a subject,
go to Library Homepage > Electronic Resources
Under Databases by Subject Area, choose your subject

The Internet contains a wealth of information but can result in "information overload," if you encounter too much information to digest. And, because anyone can create a Web page, you also may encounter incorrect or misleading information. therefore, it is very important to evaluate your sources.

Use search engines to search the Internet.

Other resources may also be appropriate.

Newspapers - Newspapers can tell you what the general public knows about a topic. They also will occasionally report new or interesting health information.

"Researchers at Indiana State University published a report in the American Journal of Nursing that found..."

You can track down the original article yourself given clues from the newspaper article. Does it say who the researchers are? They probably authored the paper. Does it say what institution is doing the research? Does it mention what publication published the original research? You can use our library resources to search for that author, institution, and publication.