>> Hi, everybody and welcome to the Writing Center's workshop
on writing a research paper.
My name's Meghan Facciuto.
I work in the Writing Center.
And if you have any questions about what you see
in this workshop today, feel free to stop by anytime.
This workshop, in particular, is geared at helping students
who have to write a research paper do a number of things
that experienced writers might do before they start writing
that paper.
So we're going to look at a number of different things,
and we also are going to have an expert research librarian doing
a portion of this workshop to help you learn how
to gather sources for a paper and how to know whether
or not those sources are going to be good sources
to use for a research paper.
But we're going to break this workshop
down into a number of different things.
First and foremost, we're going to look
at interpreting a research assignment.
So how do you look at an essay assignment and figure
out what it is that you need to do and not skip anything
over before you start writing?
We'll talk briefly about how
to brainstorm a little bit for a research paper.
And the biggest part of this workshop is going to be
about gathering sources, so that stuff that I mentioned
about that our research librarian, Karen Tercho,
is going to help us through.
We'll also talk about briefly how to organize
when you're writing a research paper and then how
to start writing it, how to draft it.
And I'll mention a few different free research help resources
on campus at Sac City College that maybe if you haven't heard
about could also help your process.
So let's start with interpreting an assignment.
I see a lot of students who come into the writing center
with a prompt and they've started researching,
but they haven't really looked super deep
into their assignment yet.
And this is really the place to start.
So let's read through this like sample research assignment
and talk about what it is that you would have to do in order
to start your research.
So I'm going to read through and you can follow along with me,
and then we'll start talking
about what this is asking you to do.
So Martin Luther King Junior, an American Civil Rights leader
and activist for peace, worked to change people's minds
about racism during a time in the United States
when it was not popular to do so,
when it was unpopular to do so.
King's arguments against racism called for peaceful protests
as a way to fight injustice.
He argued, "Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial, political
and moral questions of our time.
Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method
which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation.
The foundation of such a method is love."
Other human rights leaders during the 60s advocated
for a more forceful, demanding of justice.
Malcolm X argued that racism must be eliminated
"by any means necessary," explaining, "I have no mercy
or compassion in me for society that'll crushed people
and then penalize them for not being able
to stand up under the weight."
Based on your understanding of the Civil Rights Movement
in the US during the 50s and 60s, which approach
to equality do you believe seems most appropriate?
This essay will not require a simple explanation
of your opinion about this subject
but a critical examination of this historical period.
For example, Jim Crow laws, specific instances
of racial violence, organized protests
against racism, et cetera.
In other words, you'll need to summarize specific facts
from American history and analyze these facts
to explain whether you believe that a true fighting
of oppression requires peace or something more like retribution.
A successful paper will present a clear argument
through a well-chosen thesis statement,
which controls the organization of the paper.
This argument will be logically developed with specific,
historical, relevant examples,
and it will contain a limited number of grammatical errors.
Allow your research to help guide your opinion.
So we've got this research assignment here.
And I get to see students in all parts of their research process,
and sometimes what I'll see is a student will read
through something like this and then just jump right
into their research, but it can be helpful to stop
and ask ourselves what is this asking us to do truly.
Let's look at the first paragraph.
What is that paragraph asking you to do as a student,
as a writer of a research paper?
If you say nothing, you're right.
This paragraph is not asking you to do anything.
It's just giving a little background information.
And who is it giving about?
It's about Martin Luther King and his approach
to fighting injustice and racism.
And so if we zero in on what it's telling us, well,
King's argument against racism called for peaceful protests
as a way to fight injustice.
His way of approaching this was through love
and through nonviolence, right.
What about this next paragraph?
What is this asking you to do?
Again, nothing.
It's not asking you to do anything.
This is giving an opposing viewpoint about how
to approach the same problem, racism, right.
Malcolm X argued that we should do anything necessary
to eliminate racism, and if that means violence, well,
then it means we have to get violent.
What about this paragraph?
Now it looks like we're getting at the core question
of the paper, what you need to start thinking
about in order to do your research.
And if we zero in on that question, it's right there.
Which approach to equality do you believe seems
most appropriate?
Do you think it's better to approach the problem of racism
through nonviolence, or should we do anything necessary
to fight against it?
It also says that it's not going to be just something --
This paper is not going to just be you talking
about your opinion about the subject, right.
This is an academic paper,
so it needs to be a critical examination
of this historical period.
So when you examine something, you're looking
at it really closely, right.
So you're going to dig through some information in order
to present something that expresses your opinion
about this topic, and you're going to do
that through summary, partly.
What does it mean to summarize something,
to summarize specific facts?
Does that involve your opinion?
It does not.
It does not involve opinions.
Summary is just pulling a source, like, you know,
something that you would use from your research,
and explaining it to a reader,
so explaining what an author says or a documentarian
or whoever it is that whatever the source is
that you've gathered, explaining what that person says
in your own words, but then you'll have to analyze.
And so now, this does involve your opinion.
Analysis is involving sort of like piecing a puzzle together,
right, like you have all these pieces of information
and you're going to piece this puzzle together for the reader.
And that's going to involve your brain.
That's going to involve your opinions, but it's not going
to be just a simple, well, I feel this way because blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah.
You have to pull information from these sources
and then piece it together for a reader in order
to say what you think.
And what about this last paragraph?
It's pretty common that you'll see stuff like this
in a research assignment or any assignment, writing assignment.
Hopefully you would see something like this.
Is this asking you to do anything?
It's not. Again, this last paragraph was truly the core
of the research assignment.
This last part is telling you what a good paper will
look like.
So this is telling you what your teacher's expectations might be.
You're going to need to have a clear argument
that answers the question with a thesis statement.
A thesis statement for this paper would be an answer
to that question that was posed,
and a thesis statement often helps
to control the organization of the paper.
So your overall main idea will be found
in that thesis statement, and then you're going to break
down that overall main idea and organize your paper according
to what you say in that thesis statement to a certain extent.
And you're probably going to have to give lots of relevant,
historical examples, so details that might come
from those research sources.
And you'll want to have limited grammatical errors.
I meet with a lot of students who say I'm such a bad writer,
I don't know how to use commas,
or I don't know what verb tense even means
or that kind of thing.
And if you write a paper with perfect grammar, right,
but you have no thesis statement, that's a much,
much bigger problem than if you have a paper
with a really clear thesis statement
that answers the question,
but maybe you have some comma errors, right.
The idea is if you have no thesis statement,
you have no backbone.
You have no main idea for the paper.
Everything falls apart, and it doesn't matter
that you have perfect grammar.
If you have a few, you know, a limited number
of grammatical errors, your grade is going
to stay much higher if you have a thesis statement
and organized paper.
So that's one way of thinking about this.
You'll want to start with the ideas, what do I believe,
and how am I going to put
that information together in a clear way.
It's not to say that grammar isn't important.
It is because you have to be able
to understand a writer's sentences in order
to understand the main idea of the paper, but you'll want
to pay very close attention to how you structure this paper,
and that will help the reader make sense of it a lot more.
Okay, so we've got this writing assignment.
And that's not a very simple question, right?
Like what do you believe we should do, be peaceful
or do anything necessary to fight racism?
Well, maybe it's a little bit of both and maybe you have
to start thinking about it, right.
I'm not sure I can answer that question right away.
So when you start to brainstorm or get started
on a writing assignment, part of the way you can get started is
by poking around, looking for information, right,
like seeing what maybe you could find in the library, going up
and looking through the stacks, looking through the books, or,
as our research librarian Karen will show you later, you know,
start like going through the library website.
Another way to get started on a research assignment
where you have this great big question is maybe talk
to somebody about it, right.
Talk to your friends or roommate or, you know, a family member,
or if you wanted to have a more academic approach to it,
you could come to a tutoring center and talk
with a tutor about that.
In the Writing Center, we have lots of trained tutors
who are trained to ask you lots of good questions
to help get your ideas flowing.
So you could come to the Writing Center.
And then that way, you can start getting stuff down onto paper,
making a plan for your paper in a document
or on a scratch paper, and then you might start shaping
that search a little bit further to gather sources.
So when you start to look for information,
where do you often go?
This is where I go, right.
I Google stuff.
I Google stuff all the time.
And so there's the question of like is going
to Google the best way to find information
for a research paper.
Well, it might be in some ways and in some ways, maybe not.
And so let's talk about that.
So I'm going to go to Google, and I want to kind
of frame this whole idea of research by mentioning something
that I hear from students a lot of the time,
also which is I've never done research
so I don't know how to do this.
And that's probably not true.
If you've ever had to search for the best kind of car
that you want to buy, or if you needed to find a daycare
for your kid or, you know, that kind of thing,
oftentimes you can go to Google and a narrow down what it is
that you're looking for.
But the way to do that kind search is not
to type in car, right.
This gives us 3 billion results, right.
If you were given $5000 and you were like, oh, okay,
I'm going to go buy a car, maybe you'd go to this website
and start narrowing down what you want to look for, like, oh,
okay, I think I want a Toyota because I know
that those are pretty valuable, reliable cars.
And, okay, so here, I've got $5000 to spend.
Here's my zip code, right.
That's going to narrow down your search.
That's going to be a much more efficient way of looking
for a car than typing car, right, in Google.
In the same way, if you are doing research
for an academic paper, let's just type in Martin Luther King.
Okay. You notice we have 119 million results, so that's less
than a billion that we got before, in 0.36 seconds.
That's so many choices, right.
But does having 119 million choices really mean
that you're better positioned to make a good choice?
Maybe not, right, but let's just see what's on this first page
of hits about Martin Luther King.
So we scroll down.
You notice this first one is Wikipedia.
And what have you heard about Wikipedia from teachers?
A lot of times people will say, well,
teachers say don't use Wikipedia
as a source for a research paper.
And why is that?
Like, let's click on it.
Wikipedia has a wiki, meaning that anybody can add information
to this site, so maybe some
of that information we can't really trust, right.
We don't know what's on here or who put it here, right.
But if you scroll down and you start getting
into the nitty-gritty of what the source is or whatever it is
that you're searching on Wikipedia, you'll notice
that you have these little, you know, these sentences,
and then there are these little numbers, one, two,
like these numbers here.
Whoever put this information here cited their source,
and this here is the source that that information comes from.
So say in your paper you wanted to talk
about where King was from, you know, that he was born
in Georgia or something like that.
You wouldn't say, you know, in your paper according
to Wikipedia, right, but if you find
that that source is helpful, you know,
according to Charles J Ogletree, if we look at this WW Norton
and Company, that's a publisher, and this is the title of a book,
a book is a valuable source to use for a research paper.
And so if you asked yourself, well,
is that book available in our library.
Maybe it is, right, and if you open that book up and find
that information, you can cite Ogletree as your source,
rather than Wikipedia.
Or if we go down, you know, and we look at any
of these other ones like, let's see, what's this,
an autobiography of religious development.
Hey, that's Stanford University.
That's a reputable source, and actually that's an article
from a website that Stanford -- That's Stanford's website.
Okay, so that might be something you could cite.
If you read through it, you want to read through and make sure
that it's the information that you want, right.
So the idea is Wikipedia isn't necessarily --
Like I've heard teachers say Wikipedia is the devil.
I'm not sure I would go that far as to say that.
I would say that if you're using Wikipedia with a critical eye
and you're looking for information and making sure
that that information is legitimate,
then it's a decent source to use.
I use Wikipedia almost every day,
just to get quick information about stuff.
But you don't want to stop here.
You want to maybe allow it to point you
in a direction that makes sense.
They're a lot of people that added to this site,
but if we go all the way down, here's all the citations,
all the resources that people use to put this stuff together.
And you notice things like "New York Times," you know,
newspapers, magazines, all of these.
We've got 320 sources that put that page together.
So it's not necessarily the worst thing to do.
You just want to use it responsibly as a scholar, right.
So that was the first hit on our Google search
that gave us 119 million results.
So if we just scroll down a little bit further,
we've got biography.com, thekingcenter.org,
this one here, Martin Luther King,
a true historical examination.
So we have to do a critical examination
of this historical period, right.
When we click on this one, let's see what this is.
Okay. So here's another website, and this one, I've never heard
of this maybe in the way that I've heard of Wikipedia.
So you to sort of ask yourself, okay,
is this a good website to use.
What are some of the things that you notice on this website?
The first things students usually tell me is like, oh,
that's kind of weird that it says rap lyrics
in the middle, right.
That's a little bit out of the ordinary.
You wouldn't expect to see something like that on a website
about Martin Luther King maybe.
This over here, it says a true historical examination.
What does this say?
That night, King retired to his room at the Willard Hotel.
There, FBI bugs reportedly picked up 14 hours
of party chatter, the clinking of glasses and the sounds
of illicit sex, including King's cry I'm f-ing for God.
I'm not a Negro tonight.
Yikes. That's a little weird.
It says it comes from "Newsweek Magazine", which, you know,
I've heard of "Newsweek" before, but that's kind of weird.
Let's look a little further.
This is sort of -- Bring the dream to life in your town.
Download a flyer to pass out at your school.
There's all this stuff.
Let's see what one of these flyers looks like.
What is this?
Martin Luther King Junior, communist, woman beater,
plagiarist, subversive, adulterer, sexual deviant.
Yikes times two.
This is getting a little bit even more weird.
It looks like this is some biased information maybe
on this website, stuff that I never heard
in my history classes.
If you look a little deeper too, sometimes you can see
who hosts the website, so what the organization behind
that .org is.
And so let's click on it.
It says hosted by Stormfront.
Okay. So we see that this organization is a white pride
organization, White Pride World Wide, the voice of the new,
embattled white minority.
We are a community of racial realists and idealists.
We're white nationalists who support true diversity
and a homeland for all peoples.
Thousands of organizations promote the interests and values
and heritage of nonwhite minorities.
We promote ours.
So essentially, this is a --
It's a racist organization you could say.
This is a sort of neo-Nazi organization.
So this is certainly not the type of website
that you're going to want to use for your academic paper
about Martin Luther King or Malcolm X
because there's a great deal of bias behind that.
The beliefs of the people who put this organization,
who put this website together are very, very clear.
The problem is that, well, that's the fourth hit on Google,
on a Google Web search, right.
So this is obviously a website you don't want
to use for a research paper.
But the bigger problem is, is that there are a lot
of other websites that aren't good websites to use
and it's not as obvious, right.
Like maybe it's not as overtly wrong, right.
But if we go back up to that search bar, again,
we've got 119 million results, one of the ways
to start narrowing this down is to type colon, site.
Oh, no. I'm sorry.
Type site, colon, dot edu.
Edu is an educational website, okay.
So if we wanted to start weeding out all of the crud,
like Stormfront, now we're down to 1 million 390,000 results.
So we just effectively weeded out, what, 118 million sources.
And if you look through this, here's a dot edu.
Here's a dot edu, dot edu.
This is like Stanford, right.
That's a research institution.
You look at this website, you don't see about rap lyrics,
right, or weird flyers to pass out at your school.
So this is one way to use Google in a more efficient way, right.
Like it's kind of like going to cars.com rather
than typing car into Google.
So this is one way to do it.
A dot edu is an educational website.
So anybody who has access to or power
in putting a website together is attached
to an educational institution.
Another way to do this is to put dot gov, right.
These are government websites.
Now, we're down to 478,000.
So now, we're 119 million down, right.
So these ones, you'll notice they're all dot gov, dot gov,
dot gov, dot gov, Americaslibrary.gov.
Maybe we don't know what these are right off, you know,
right off the bat, but the Library
of Congress is very much more likely going to be something
that you want to use for an academic paper
than Martin Luther King, a true historical examination.
So, okay. So this is one way to use Google to your advantage.
Another way, which is something that Karen's going to walk you
through later, is to use Google Scholar.
So if we type in Google Scholar, what is a scholar?
A scholar is, you know, in many ways a student, right,
somebody who is in the world of academia.
You can see here articles.
Like, you're going to find stuff that's maybe more
academic sources.
So Martin Luther King Junior.
Here, we're down to 140,000, right, in 0.07 seconds.
That's so fast.
So here, we're weeding out a whole bunch of other stuff,
but one thing I want to keep in mind is you can go through
and use Google Scholar here, but it's going
to be much more effective if you do it
through our library website,
which Karen will walk you through in a bit.
So I'm going to come back out here and basically say
that Google is useful.
It's useful to do research, but it's useful in doing all kinds
of research, in addition to academic research.
If you want to write a research paper, Google might be a place
that you go, but if you want to find additional things
and maybe even faster than you would in Google, the best place
to go is probably our library's website.
If we open up the Sac City website,
we can go to the library website, and Karen's going
to explain to you lots and lots more about how
to do a much more focused search.
>> Hey there.
This is Karen, and I am here to show you some things
about the Sacramento City College library.
The first thing I wanted to mention was why use the library.
We do have a lot of resources, books, e-books,
articles from magazines, newspapers,
and scholarly journals that you cannot find for free on the web.
So the reason you come to the library is not
because everything in the world is here,
but there are academic resources
that are geared toward your programs of study,
and we have paid for them so that you don't have to.
So sometimes when you go on the web, you get a mixture of things
and you really have to worry
about whether or not it's reliable.
Well here, you can kind of rest assured
that we've gathered reliable resources, and you should look
and pay attention to what they are, but you don't have to worry
as much about whether or not they are valid and credible.
So we are going to talk about searching
for Martin Luther King Junior.
And the first thing I'm going to do is just put in a search
for Martin Luther King, and then we'll see what happens.
Now what we're doing right now is we're searching what's called
One Search.
There is a way to get to One Search under essentials.
And then if you put a search though
into this main search box, that will bring you to One Search.
What it is, it's scanning all the library resources,
so all the books, all the DVDs, all the textbooks,
and a ton of articles, you know, like millions of articles
from thousands of different journals,
newspapers, and magazines.
So we're going to put this search in here.
We're going to leave everything as is
so it's searching everything, as you can see
from the little button below the search box.
And I just hit enter or search.
Both of them work.
And you'll see that we got 89,373 results.
And one of the first results is
or the first result is Martin Luther King Senior.
So this is a lot of results, and we can definitely narrow down,
but what I wanted to show you was if we back it
up a little bit and we actually change our search up
and instead Martin Luther King Junior,
and then we'll try again.
And you'll see that we got 64,389 results.
This is significantly fewer results, which is a good thing,
and our research starter at the very top, the first result,
goes to the man who we are researching,
who is Martin Luther King Junior.
So what I wanted to point
out through this is the keywords matter,
the words that you put into the search box.
So they should be concise.
They should be succinct, and the junior, you don't need to worry
about punctuation or the period, the JR period.
Just put the JR for something like this,
and you will get more accurate results.
You also have to spell everything correctly.
So if you don't get any results
for your search, check your spelling.
Instead of using full sentences,
think of it as like an Instagram hashtag.
So, you know, if you were eating pizza in Midtown Sacramento,
you wouldn't say I'm eating pizza in Midtown Sacramento.
You would say hashtag pizza, hashtag Midtown, right,
so hashtag Sacramento.
So think of it as keywords as concise,
the most important words, and then you'll be all right.
You'll have more successful searches.
So we still did get a lot of results here.
And the research starter, I would recommend.
It's like an encyclopedia entry.
I would recommend if you're searching
for a well-known topic, such as Martin Luther King Junior,
a person or, you know, some major topic
like population growth or climate change,
use these research starters to give yourself some background.
If you click on the title of any of the resources,
it will tell you way more about it
than if you just look at the results page.
And on the right-hand side, you have all these options
of printing, emailing, saving this to your computer,
if you have your own computer.
You can generate a citation.
We'll talk about that a little more,
but I do recommend the research starter.
If you see it, just take a look at it,
and it might be a very good starting point
for your research, like I said, background information.
So the other thing we want to look
at is the left-hand side, the limiters.
There are a lot of options on the left-hand side you'll see.
And I encourage you to explore these and experiment with them.
And anything you do, you can pretty much undo,
so you don't really have to worry about breaking anything.
The biggest risk with searching One Search, you get a lot
of results and you definitely want
to start emailing the things you want to yourself right away
because if you try to go back
and find something again using your memory,
there's so many resources in here that it might not happen.
You know, you might forget what it was that you were looking at
and it looked really good and then you're sad.
So to avoid that, just email yourself all these resources.
So let's look at this book.
So this is going to be, like I said, One Search is going
to give you a mix of books, articles,
and so some of these are physical resources and some
of these are just, you know, electronic, online.
Now that doesn't mean you're using a website.
You are in the library database.
So if your instructor says don't use websites,
that doesn't mean you can't use the library.
It's a different thing.
So we pay for these subscriptions and, you know,
that's what you're searching.
So back to books, so a biography is a really good place to start
if you're researching a person.
And you know what we could have done also is put in the word
"biography," Martin Luther King Junior biography
and it will bring up pretty much all the biographies we have.
And usually, biographies are books.
And sometimes, they're e-books.
Sometimes they are physical books.
You can tell what it is by this little icon.
So I'm looking at result number three.
That is an e-book.
Result number four is a physical book.
Now let me click on the title of the book
and that will tell me more information about the book.
We can see two copies of this book, two different locations,
American River College and Sacramento City College.
So you want to pay attention to the location,
the call number, and the status.
And each line on this represents a copy of the book.
If you are here at Sac City College, you will write
down the call number and go
to the third floor to find the book.
If you've never done that before,
just ask at the research helpdesk for help and guidance.
And often on the third floor, there is someone to help you.
So we will help you with that for sure.
Now say somebody checked this book out
and it says it's not here.
It will give you the due date if the book is checked out.
So you can actually request the book
from American River College, and any book on any other campus,
you can basically request, and that campus will put it aside
for you and actually send it, will take it off the shelf
and send it to where you want it to go.
So you just click on request this item.
You put in your W number and your Los Rios password.
You choose your pickup location, and you click on submit.
Now this will give you the book in two to three business days,
and you'll get an email in your school email box,
inbox when it's ready to pick up.
So it's really convenient.
It works just like pretty much like Sac public library,
if you've ever done that.
Okay. So e-books, those are important
if you need a book right away.
Now you're not going to read the whole book.
Most likely, you're going to use a couple of few chapters
out of these books, right.
So reading on a screen is not so bad.
If you're writing a research paper,
it's actually really convenient.
And again, books will provide background information.
So here, I'm just showing you this e-book, and I'm going
to click on -- You can see the description of the book.
You can actually see a summary oftentimes
of the articles and e-books.
And if you click on PDF full text, that is the best way
to deliver this e-book to yourself.
There is a limit to the number of pages you can email
to yourself, but it opens up the full book
so you can always just read on your computer.
We have remote access to all of these resources, by the way.
So if you're not on campus,
you can access all the articles and all the e-books.
The only difference is you'll be asked to enter your W number
and your Los Rios password at a certain point when you try
to access that resource.
That is the only thing you have to do
and you can access all these things from off campus.
So this e-book, you can click around on the left.
There's the table of contents.
And what happens is, if I go to the introduction of this book
and then I ask you to email me pages,
you can actually email yourself 100 pages at a time.
So you would say current page and the next 99,
and it will deliver the actual PDF into your e-box.
You just put your email in there.
You put a subject, e-book, MLK Junior, and then you click
on email PDF and it'll happen.
It will email you the book.
So this works the same with articles.
We'll look at that really quick too.
Okay. So I'm just going to email this to myself.
So now I have the first hundred pages of this book.
I can go back in and email myself more later,
but the publishers don't allow us
to email the entire book right away.
So that's just something to be aware of.
And again, with e-books, you'll only use maybe, you know --
You might not need the whole thing.
You might, but you might not.
Okay. I'm going back to my result list,
Martin Luther King Junior.
And I wanted to narrow down some more.
Now say you need an article.
So first of all, I'm going to change the date.
you can change the publication date.
So say I want more recent things on MLK Junior.
You know, new scholarship and research comes out all the time
on major topics like the Civil Rights Movement.
People are always writing about it.
So say I want more recent things, I can change the date
and that narrows down my results even more.
My instructor, just suppose, says, okay,
I want you to get a newspaper article, a magazine article,
an academic journal article.
You can basically check these boxes off, we're going to look
at academic journals, and it will narrow it
down to just those types of resources.
And then to undo that, you just click on this blue x, okay,
and that will go back to all of your whatever it was,
all of my 56,000 results or whatever, but I'm just looking
at right now academic journals
because my instructor said you have to find these.
And I want to look through the titles, and they're supposed
to be sorted by relevance.
If I put another keyword in here,
it might narrow it down some more.
Like if I put Martin Luther King Junior civil rights,
it will fill in some suggestions.
But say I want articles just about that.
That's what I'm looking at.
And there are some really interesting things in here.
So say I want this article.
Oh, and then it undid my --
Sometimes when you add a keyword,
it will undo your limiters.
So it actually took away my academic journals.
I'm putting it back.
I'm checking it off again.
Just pay attention to the left-hand side.
There're a lot of options.
And then, okay, let's say I want this first article.
I'm going to click on it.
I'm clicking on the title.
That will show me more about it.
And then I've decided I want this article.
Now I could go to the right-hand side
and just email it to myself.
It will email me a link and the citation, the information
about the book, right, but if you click on PDF full text,
anytime you're in One Search, just keep an eye
on where it says PDF full text
and that will give me the entire article.
I can go ahead and email it to myself.
I can also email it to myself in MLA or APA format
or whatever citation format your instructor asked for.
So this, again, is really easy.
Email it to yourself.
You can cite it as well.
You can also cite it on the right-hand side.
There's a citation button.
And just be careful
to double-check the citations because, you know,
it's computer-generated.
They're often mistakes like things in all capitals.
So with the citations, you can just copy
and paste them into your work cited.
Again, just be sure to double-check them.
Okay. So that was an article a little bit about how
to find articles, books, things like that.
And what I'm going to do now is jump back
to Sacramento City College Library main page,
which is on the upper right-hand side.
You just click on that logo.
And I wanted to tell you about the research databases page.
So you will be searching One Search.
That's the easiest way to start.
Again, that search has all the library resources.
But if I could research databases, it breaks all
of our library resources down,
not the physical books but all the articles.
We also have films.
We have art.
There are a lot of resources in here, and so if you break it
down by category, it can help you narrow down
and focus your search before you, you know,
at the sort of beginning stages of your research.
So Academic Search Complete is a good place to start.
This is the first on the list.
It's under general.
If you're not sure where to go and One Search is overwhelming,
start with Academic Search Complete
because you will definitely find articles on your topic.
There's something about everything.
CQ Researcher helps
with political topics, controversial topics.
And then the other thing I wanted to point out,
which Meghan mentioned, was Google Scholar.
If you access Google Scholar from the library pages,
it will give you the full text.
If you're looking and doing research on Google on your own
without the library, you're going to run into some resources
that look great, but you're going
to hit a pay wall is what we call it.
So you'll be asked for money, and we don't want that to happen
to you because you're already paying tuition
and we've already gathered all these wonderful resources
for you.
So start at the library.
If you to use Google Scholar, that is a really good thing.
It's a great search engine, but just click on it
through the library page because then, again,
you'll get all the full texts
that we have already subscribe to.
So that's the research databases page.
Remember, this page is giving you a list of databases.
So you have to click on them to go to the next stage
and actually do your research.
You have all these choices.
So if and when you need help,
please ask at the research helpdesk.
You can also call us.
You can IM us.
And then to get back to the main page of this library,
on the upper right-hand side here, I'm just going to click
on SCC and I'm back at the library main page.
So once again, don't forget to ask us
for help should you need it and happy research.
>> Okay. So thank you, Karen,
for all of that awesome information.
I feel like that's a great overview of maybe how
to get really detailed into your search.
So now, if you've done a lot of that work of searching
for your sources and you've got this great, you know,
collection of things that you want to use for your paper,
so now you sort of have to start organizing
and drafting that paper.
And so here's some information on how
to maybe start doing that.
So organizing your paper, be sure to keep a record
of all the sources that you've gathered so they don't get lost
and so that you don't need to repeat the research.
There's nothing worse than going back to the library website
and trying to find that thing that you found before
and you can't find it now again.
And so keep a record of everything.
So the way that Karen showed you to email something
to yourself is a great idea.
Search for quotes or evidence in the sources
that you've found that'll help develop
or express your argument.
So once you have these articles or, you know, this information
from a website or something, narrow down the things
from that source that you think are useful.
Maybe highlight them or save them somewhere in your research.
Allow the assignment to help structure the essay.
So if you feel like you have all these ideas
and you don't know how to organize them,
go back to your assignment and see
if the assignment gives you any clues as to how to put
that essay together because maybe the teacher's saying,
you know, first, I want you to do this and then I want you
to do this, and you can use that in order
to help structure your own essay.
When you start drafting,
when you start actually writing the paper, keep in mind
that it'll be helpful to set up a schedule
for composing the essay so that you don't run out of time.
A lot of the times when you write an essay,
sometimes you can cram and do it the night before,
not that I'm saying that's a good thing to do,
but I've done it before.
When you're putting together a research paper,
you can't necessarily do that though, right.
Like you need time to write this because first,
you have to gather your sources and you have
to give yourself time in case that book isn't in our library
and you got to order it from another campus, right.
So set up a schedule so that you don't run
out of time while you're writing it.
Avoid distractions.
So if your distractions are noise, stay away from noise.
If your distractions are silence, stay away from silence.
Whatever it is that you know is going to make you stop writing,
avoid that thing, but then
at the same time, take breaks, right.
So if you've been at it for so long
and you just aren't finding what you need, maybe take a break
because you might need to eat something or take a nap
or something like that and then come back to the research later.
When in doubt, ask your teacher about the assignment
or about your progress.
Many teachers at Sac City College are very open
to questions, right.
Like if you say, well, I started this research, but I don't know
if I'm really on the right track, you could come
to the Writing Center and ask that question,
but you could very well go to your teacher's office hours
and just say here's what I'm thinking and I want to do,
does that seem like I'm on track,
and you'll very likely get an answer.
And then one other thing here, don't worry so much
about formatting that it slows down
or stops the drafting process, the writing of the paper.
So if your teacher's asking you to use MLA format or APA format
and you don't know at all what that means, don't worry so much
about it at the very beginning
because sometimes it can slow you down to the point
where you're not getting your ideas onto the page.
You're so focused on the formatting.
Again, you can come to the Writing Center to talk
about that if you like, but maybe save that for the end.
Just make sure that you know where all
of your information comes from while you're writing the paper
and then save the formatting for later.
And then leave time for revision and proofreading.
Rather than just hitting print and turning it in,
if you give yourself time to revise, to proofread,
to maybe come by the Writing Center, have an extra set
of eyes look through it, it's very likely that you're going
to pick up many of the things that you didn't intend to be
on the page and will have time
to make them clearer for your reader.
And then if you're feeling stuck, like I said,
I keep saying visit the Writing Center
or the research helpdesk in the library.
You can run into somebody like Karen who is 100%, you know,
trained in helping you find the information that you need,
maybe in places that you're not expecting to see it.
And then in the Writing Center, you can meet with tutors who,
like I said, are trained to help you get your ideas
down onto the paper, or once they're down on paper,
they can help you clarify them for a reader.
And this last little bit I wanted
to mention is just other options that you have
for free research help.
On the library website, there is a function
that says ask a librarian where you can type a question
and a librarian is live to give you an answer to that question.
And so that's something that you can see on the library website.
There are library workshops that help you go through the process
of doing research, and they're offered really frequently.
So if you'd like to go in person and get a little lesson
on this sort of thing in addition to watching this video,
the library workshops, you can find them
on the library website.
You can make a one-on-one research appointment,
which is super cool.
It's kind of like sitting down with a tutor one-on-one.
You can sit down with a research librarian one-on-one.
Go up to the reference desk on the second floor of the LRC
and ask about that if you'd like to meet
with somebody one-on-one.
And then Pilot is a self-paced program on the library website
that is sort of like a little self-paced class
that teaches you all sorts of different things about how
to do research, and you could do that in your own time
if you feel like that would be useful.
And then if you have questions about any of this stuff,
you're welcome to call the Writing Center or the library
and tell us what it is that you're doing,
and hopefully we can help with your process.
So if you have any questions,
give us a call or stop by anytime.