Information Literacy (LIBR 2100)

In the module "Searching as Strategic Exploration" we present the various search tools available to you in detail. 

Information gathering goes beyond the tools and involves:

• reading and interpreting the results
• making connections among the materials you find
• using the search tools to find additional material that is relevant to your research topic

You will learn to:

• read for research
• read bibliographies
• "chase" citations

As your research continues, the sources you find begin to pile up. You will have books, articles and websites to consider, and it can feel like an overwhelming amount of information to read.

You won't be able to thoroughly read everything you find - even if you are a fast reader. Badke (2008, p. 137) recommends that instead, you read for research.

To read for research:

• Be ruthless. Use the article or book to understand the information it contains. Make sure you have noted the citation information. Then move on as quickly as possible.
• Be careful not to read out of context, though! Be sure that you do understand the main message. (See also "attribution decay" in a later chapter.) Do you know what the author is saying and why?
• Get to know the material without reading it all from cover-to-cover. You won't have time.
• Understand the type of source and how it's organized. E.g. books and articles are very different, but in each case you can use they way they are structured to quickly gather information (Badke, 2008, p. 137-8).

While you might read novels from cover-to-cover for enjoyment (or admittedly as assigned reading), you do not want to approach reading for research in the same way. It is doubtful that you will read all the books you find on a topic from front to back. Nor should you!

Badke (2008) makes the following suggestions when reading a book for research. Get the details without missing the important information by:

1. Examine the title page, preface, foreword and introduction. These are at the very front of the book and are usually great sources for determining "why this book was written"
2. Look closely at the table of contents. This outlines the entire structure of the book in is proper order. Then, zero in on the chapter you really want or need
3. Is there an index? Indexes are located at the very end of a book, and point us back to specific information and where it is found in the book. For example:  Daily nutrient intake, 130-137, 140, 167 in an index indicates that the information about this topic is found on these pages of the book. The longest section is pages 130-137, and the topic gets only a brief mention on pages 140 and 167. Note that not all books have indexes, but they are useful when they exist.
4. Run through the whole book - a book is meant to exist as a whole and you want to understand its overall intent. Skim the beginning and ending portions of each chapter. Look at subheadings throughout the book. If there is a summary or conclusion chapter at the end of the book, go over it.
5. Ask yourself questions all throughout your "reading" of a book. Interacting with a text is a key to good analysis.

Reading articles

When we're reading a magazine article or a book, we usually read from the beginning to the end.

But did you know that it's rare for anyone to read an academic article like this?

You don't read an academic article in order, you don't read every word, and you don't read for full understanding (Montgomery, 2015). You read enough to get a clear understanding of its purpose, approach, and outcomes.

Focus instead on IMRaD or "I'm Rad!" (Montgomery, 2015).

Introduction - why did the author write the article?

Methods - how did they do the research?

Results - what did they discover?

Discussion - why do they think it's important?

A transcript is available on the video's YouTube page.

As you are scanning the articles you've found about a topic, it's very tempting to highlight a sentence or a quote that looks important, or circle it, and keep reading.

Stop.

Does the passage have a citation? Be sure to notice citations and use them to find related articles that are relevant to your topic of study.

Then return to your article and continue reading. When you notice another pertinent point, stop. Make note of any citation, and follow it to find a related article.

Remember to be efficient and bypass the citations that are not directly related to your research. But pay close attention to citations that are.

Paying attention to citations as you read strategically enables you to avoid what's called "attribution decay." When you include information in a paper that you seem to recall reading somewhere, but were not careful to document the source, you have attribution decay and can easily find yourself unintentionally plagiarizing someone's work.

This video demonstrates

• reading an article abstract to understanding the purpose
• noticing citations within the article
• finding citations in a bibliography
• using the bibliography to locate other related articles

Another important skill in gathering information is reading bibliographies.

As librarians, we're still amazed how many people will photocopy or print an article without including the bibliography or reference list! Sure enough, later on, there will be a great quote that is just perfect, and no reference to track down the original source with!

Always keep and read the bibliographies. What you want to do is get skilled at knowing which kind of source is being referred to by looking at its components in the reference entry.

This enables you to then find those related materials efficiently using the most appropriate search tool.

This video demonstrates how to read a bibliography and identify the kind of resource being described in the reference entry.

A transcript is available on the video's YouTube page.

This is an excellent description of citation analysis and citation chasing by Robert Slater, from the University Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2014, para 1):

Counting citations is often called "citation analysis." In your scholarly research, you may need to gauge the importance of a publication by counting the number of times it has been cited by other scholars. When you count the number of times an article has been cited in published research, you gain information about that article's impact on its discipline. If an article has a high number of citations, you may conclude that it has been the subject of discussion or criticism in its discipline. In addition, finding the list of articles that have cited an article can help you find more information about your research topic, a process called "citation chasing."

"Counting citations" sounds simple; however, citation analysis tools count citations from different sets of publications. When you are performing a citation analysis, you may wish to use several resources to count citations in order to fully capture an article's impact.

Several tools can help you to find out how many times a specific article, author, or journal has been cited:

• Web of Science 
• Scopus   
• Google Scholar
• Other Resources

Slater, R. (2014, November 3). Citation analysis. Retrieved June 27, 2016 from the University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign website: http://www.library.illinois.edu/learn/research/citationanalysis.html

This video demonstrates using the "Related articles" feature in Web of Science and Novanet Discovery. There is a "Related articles" feature in Google Scholar which is demonstrated in the Searching as Strategic Exploration module.

MountLibrary (2016, June 27). Related articles. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/7Ppewrgh8_8