SUPERCHARGE YOUR SEARCH 2014

Matthew Von Hendy MA/MLS

Green Heron Information Services

WELCOME!

Owner—Green Heron Information Services

Professional Librarian—National Academies of Science, EPA, NASA

Birder, cyclist, runner—recent Alaskan adventurer

SESSION GOALS

Discuss Google and other search engines Talk about searching tips and tools Cover places to go to find free full text for

journal articles and images Look at high quality/low cost research

databases Peek at citation reference managers Questions and answers

SEARCH ENGINES

GOOGLE RULES!

Google is the resource that professional evaluators use to find research resources most often

A few words of caution: Google ‘filters’ results based on previous

searches Try searching in an alternate search engine

to double check your google results

ALTERNATE SEARCH ENGINES

DuckDuckGo https://duckduckgo.com/ Blekko http://blekko.com/ Ixquick https://ixquick.com/ Baidu http://www.baidu.com

Try searching your name on Google vs. these 3

HOT SEARCHING TIP #1

When searching Google… Use the site filter to limit to a particular

website or type of domain ( site:http://www.epa.gov) or site:edu

Use the filetype filter to limit your results to PDFs (filetype:PDFs)

More google searching tips can be found at:http://

www.google.com/insidesearch/tipstricks/all.html

SEARCHING TOOLS

Use ‘Advanced Search’ tools if available Boolean Operators – AND, OR, NOT Truncation symbol – ‘*’ finds anything that

starts with the root of a word Phrase searching – quotation marks “ “ Date limiters—allow you to specific dates of

search

FREE FULL TEXT ARTICLES Google Scholar scholar.google.comSubset of Google that focus on ‘academic’

literature

Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/

Crowd-sourcing site—many researchers have downloaded their work here

Directory of Open Access Journals http://doaj.org/

Somewhat of a ‘work in progress’ but does allow searching for articles

HOT SEARCH TIP #2

Tip: For Google Scholar:Use the Advanced Search by clicking on the

downward facing carat on the right side of the search box

FREE IMAGES

Keep in mind copyright and attribution Pixabay http://pixabay.com/en/ morgueFile http://www.morguefile.com/

RESEARCH DATABASES

Excellent sources of high quality information—

Almost every field has a good/low-cost free research database

Articles/information is often abstracted and indexed aiding searching

SOME EXAMPLES

(Health Sciences) PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed

(Education) ERIC http://eric.ed.gov/ (Transportation) TRID http://trid.trb.org/ For Science and Technology Resources

see my article.. http://www.infotoday.com/OnlineSearcher/Articles/Features/Fifty-Shades-of-Scientific-and-Technical-Grey-Literature-96758.shtml

HOT SEARCH TIP #3

Some publishers offer discounted rates for one-time access to their research resources

American Psychological Association (APA) offers a $11.95 24 hour pass to their 3 major databases including PsycINFO—

http://www.apa.org/pubs/databases/access/direct.aspx

DO YOUR CITATIONS LOOK LIKE THIS?

CITATION MANAGERS CAN HELP…

Organize your citations Citation information can be downloaded

directly from most search tools into many citation managers

Allow for PDFs of articles to be attached to articles

Can be shared between people if they are using the same program

Automatically creates in-text citations and reference lists in a specified citation format (APA 5th, MLA)

FREE CITATION MANAGERS

Endnote Web http://www.myendnoteweb.com/

(There is a full version of Endnote which requires a subscription).

Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/ Zotero https://www.zotero.org/

TRACKING FEDERAL AND STATE LEGISLATION

Congress.gov New website developed by Library of Congress to track federal legislation http://beta.congress.gov/

National Conference of State Legislature List of State Billing Tracking Sites http://www.ncsl.org/research/telecommunications-and-information-technology/bill-tracking-and-subscription-services.aspx

Bill Track 50 – Search federal and state bills http://www.billtrack50.com/

GOVERNMENT REPORTS

Great sources for topical overviews, recent resources and up to date statistics

Government Accountability Officehttp://www.gao.gov/ Congressional Research Service Open Access

https://opencrs.com/

HOT SEARCH TIP #4

When searching databases use these 5 action words to find evaluation related articles on a particular topic

Assess, analyze, evaluate, measure, impact (“youth violence”) and (assess* or analyz* or

evalu* or measure* or impact*)

GREY LITERATURE

What is it? Essentially everything that is not a journal

article or a book Most evaluation-related works are grey

literature resources They are usually hard to find because they

are typically not included in the major databases (Google will pick up some but not all of them)

GREY LITERATURE RESOURCES

New York Academy of Medicine Grey Lit Report-- http://www.greylit.org/

Health sciences, health policy including evaluation

Popline -- http://www.popline.org/ Reproductive health and family planning Defense Technical Information Center --

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/DOD sponsored publicly available research

QUESTIONS?

IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS LATER…

Always happy to chat about research questions and research resources

Monthly newsletter on research resources and tips for evaulators – if you are interested in getting it – email me: info@greenheroninfo.com

CONNECT WITH ME

Matthew Von Hendy Green Heron Information Services (240) 401-7433 info@greenheroninfo.com www.greenheroninfo.com LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/vonhendy Twitter @GreenHeronInfo

THANK YOU!