North Seattle Community College North Seattle Community College
Library & Media Services

Research Guide for ENG102: Media in American Culture

Finding & Evaluating Online Sources

Prepared by Elinor Appel
NSCC Librarian (contact info).

To get help:

Email me, Meebo me, or come to the library reference desk and chat with a librarian.

NSCC Library (this will open in a new window)

 

 

Image licensed under Creative Commons by BrotherMagneto

Keywords

Consider your keywords (search terms) in order to retrieve the results you want.

  • When you search, remember to use both broad and narrow search terms: The Simpsons (narrow), televison cartoons (broader); television programming (very broad). Adjust your terms to fit the tool you are searching. 

Websites

Web-search tips

  • Limit your search by domain, for instance educational sites:

    • domain

  • Always check your online source for Authority, Bias, and Currency.
    • Authority: who created the content? Does it reference the sources/authors to statements it makes?
    • Bias: what is the bias, mission, or standpoint of the resource? Is its bias clear?
    • Currency: when was the page last updated? Is the information still relevant?
  • ABC web evaluation guide - evaluation worksheet (pdf)

Exercise I: Evaluating Web Resources for Authority (who is the author?), Bias (point of view, purpose), and Currency (last update). (Example)

Articles

Periodical databases contain full-text articles in publications ranging from popular to scholarly. These publications vary by audience and purpose, so think about which kind of article will serve your topic best. If you can't remember how to distinguish between periodicals, click on this overview.

Refer to Finding Articles for tips on how to search ProQuest using keywords and Topics. Finding the related ProQuest Topics will help you retrieve related articles when your terms have two different meanings, for instance race.

Again: think about your keywords. Experiment with related terms, for instance: women, gender, female.

  • and – for combining concepts/keywords, will narrow the search: women and advertising
  • or – when you are using related terms, will broaden the search: advertising or media
  • * - when you have related terms with the same stem term: ad* for ad, ads, advertisements, advertising, etc.

Other periodical databases:

  • Academic Search Premier - another general database with a range of articles
  • eLibrary Academic - an articles database that includes images, transcripts
  • Ethnic NewsWatch - articles from ethnic and minority publications

To access these databases from off campus, log in with your Student ID Number and last name.

Exercise II: Finding articles in popular, trade and scholarly publications.

  • Groups 1 & 2: find an article from a popular publication on The Simpsons.
  • Groups 3 & 4: find an article from a trade publication on The Simpsons
  • Groups 5 & 6: find a scholarly article on The Simpsons

Books

Use books for both background information (reference books) or in-depth information (circulating collection).

Refer to Finding Books for tips on searching the catalog using keywords and subjects. Begin with a Keyword Relevance search:

catalog

Then find a title that looks good:

Click on the title to open the record. Check location, call number, and availability.

Locate the subjects in the record . . .

These subject links will lead to more on the same topic. You may need to look at several different book titles in order to collect your related subject headings.

A few final points:

  • Can't find a book on your topic? Consider searching more broadly, then check the index of the book for information related to your topic. (Just because your topic isn't in the title doesn't mean it isn't in the book!)
  • For some topics you will find more information in books, for others it will be more useful to search periodical databases for articles, or the Internet. This is especially true of newer information.

Annotated Bibliographies and Noodlebib

Noodlebib will help you cite your sources correctly and will save all your citations for you formatted for a Works Cited page. Click here for an example of a Noodlebib record.

Additional resources:

And two more online guides to writing an annotated bibliography:

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