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SOCY 122: Introduction to Academic Library Research

Course guide library research tutorial

About this Tutorial

1: Introduction: Some introductory remarks and a quick overview of the tutorial.

2: Overview: A general orientation to Queen's University Library and major research tools available from the library homepage.

3: Choosing Your Topic: Addresses selecting an appropriate sociological topic, tips on how to broaden or narrow the scope of your topic, and finding background information through discipline-specific encyclopedias.

4: Search Strategies: Search techniques you can employ to improve the efficiency of your search results.

5: Finding Books: How to search for books by title, author and topic using Omni, Queen's library's academic search tool, and how to locate them on the library's shelves.

6: Finding Articles: Characteristics of different types of articles you may come across in your research (scholarly, popular and newspaper); finding the most relevant article indexes and databases for your topic; and searching Sociological Abstracts, Academic Search Complete, Omni and Google Scholar.

7: Searching the Web: Search techniques for searching the web and tips on using Google's Advanced Search.

8: Using Information: Considers two very important aspects in the research process that occur after you have located a piece of information: evaluating and citing sources.

9: Getting Help: Where to go for research help if and when you need it.

Visual Aids in this Tutorial

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