Dr. Steven Herb
October 13, 2003

The following research tips are designed to facilitate your work in the Education & Behavioral Sciences Library, especially with regard to your studies in Curriculum & Instruction. Should you ever need additional guidance, please do not hesitate to ask a librarian for assistance.

Finding Books
The CAT is Penn State's online catalog of books and journals available in the University Libraries system. For a basic introduction, see A Quick Guide to the Cat. This guide will tell you not only how to search for books and journals on The CAT, but also how you may request library materials that are not housed here on the University Park campus.

For a few sample searches, try the following:

• AUTHOR: Nelson, Murry R
  o Retrieves 10 entries of works by Professor Nelson
  o Retrieves 4 theses for which Professor Nelson served as advisor
  o Retrieves 1 entry for Nelson, Murry-just so happens to be the same person as Murry R. Nelson!
  o NOTE: Search for AUTHOR: Murry Nelson yields items whose authors' last name is Murry!
• TOPIC: social studies education AND KEYWORD: secondary AND KEYWORD: United States
  o Retrieves 18 items: books (both Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal classification systems), government documents, theses, and a report from the ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research).
  o See how your results dramatically expand if you eliminate either of the KEYWORD searches paired with the TOPIC search.
• KEYWORD: social studies education; then LIMIT by MATERIAL TYPE:
  o Books, bound journals Online resources
  o CD-ROMs Periodicals
  o Dissertations Video material
  o Instructional materials
• Also LIMIT by library location, publication date, language, etc.

  Remember to use The Cat's truncation symbol ($) whenever you wish to search efficiently on several words derived from the same root. For example:
  TOPIC + SUBJECT = school$ retrieves items whose title and/or subject(s) includes not only school, but also schools, schooling, schooled, Schoolcraft, etc.
  

The PSU Libraries uses the Library of Congress classification for books, journals, and videos. For a complete guide to the classification scheme by subject, go to: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/lcco.html

Always be sure to note from The CAT the location of the item(s) in which you're interested. The subject area(s) of your research will determine where the resources that you'll use are housed. At the service desks you may request a "stack guide" that tells you where call numbers may be found in the Pattee/Paterno Libraries. Click here http://www.libraries.psu.edu/tour/elevation.html to see a map of the Pattee/Paterno complex. Still more libraries for different subject areas are scattered across campus. Stop by any service desk to consult a map or to get directions to various libraries here at University Park.

Finding Journal Articles

There are several approaches that you can take to locating journal articles:

• Using The CAT, browse the titles of Penn State's periodicals devoted to social studies. Search TOPIC + SUBJECT with the phrase social studies, limiting the Material type" to Periodicals.
  
• From the Libraries' homepage, go to the E-Resource List http://www.lias.psu.edu/alall.html . There you may choose from over 200 databases or online indexes, ranging from very general to highly specialized, in a wide variety of disciplines. Many of these offer full text. If a database provides only citations and abstracts, then you may search by the journal title in The CAT or the Full Text Electronic Journals database listed with the E-Resources. See also How to Find an Article: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/instruction/how_tofind/article.htm
• On the Libraries' homepage, go to Articles and More http://www.libraries.psu.edu/instruction/how_tofind/article.htm ; then follow the link to Find Articles by Subject http://www.lias.psu.edu/gensubjlist.html
• If you wish to browse an online journal, go to E-Journals at Penn State http://apps.libraries.psu.edu/fasttrack/search.cfm
• ProQuest Direct is an excellent database for locating newpaper, magazine, and journal articles on an extremely broad range of topics. Access Proquest through the E-Resource List. Consult the "Browse Topics" and "Search Tips" sections under Tools for guidance with constructing searches. While some entries provide only citation and abstract, many others are full text, including graphics (see full-page icon); some are in PDF and may be read with Adobe Acrobat (see full-page icon with camera overlay).

PsycINFO (via SilverPlatter): PsycINFO is the primary database for psychology and related disciplines. SilverPlatter acess offers:

• full text, searchable access to more than 25,000 searchable full-text articles from 42 journals published by APA and allied organizations from 1988 to the present;
• links to non-APA full text journals owned in electronic format by PSU libraries;
• indexing and abstracting from 1300 journals from 50 countries,
• indexing and abstracting from books and book chapters, technical reports, and dissertations.
  
  Related subject areas included education, organizational management, psychophysiology, psychiatry, nursing, ergonomics, environmental psychology, human factors engineering, sociology, business, law and more. Published by the American Psychological Association. Coverage from 1887-Present.
  

• This database is distributed by the same company that owns Education Abstracts. See instructions above for how to perform basic searches.
• The truncation symbol in PSYCHINFO is the asterisk (*). Group together terms that should be treated as a phrase inside parentheses. Experiment with the following searches:
  o (Social studies) AND education AND secondary = 158 results
  o (Social studies) AND (secondary education) = 36 results
  o (Social studies) AND (teacher education) = 95 results
  o (Social studies) AND teach* AND education = 538 results
  o (Social studies) AND teach* AND (secondary education) = 16 results
  
• Note the variety of types of information (access points) by which you may search in this database:

  Abstract	Major descriptors
  Access URL	Minor descriptors
  Accession number	Number of references
  Author	Publisher
  Author affiliation	Series title
  Book source	Source
  Citation	Special issue
  Conference information	Subject
  Corporate author	Table of Contents
  Correspondence address	Title
  Descriptors	UMI order number
  ISBN	URL - journal
  ISSN - electronic	URL - publisher
  ISSN - print

Click on "Change" to limit your search by a wide variety of parameters, most of which can be limited still further using drop-down bars:

Language	Correction date
Publication type	Document type
Update code (by dates)	Publication location
URLs, etc	Media type
Age group	Population (human/animal)
Audience type	Special features (materials)

ProQuest Psychology Journals: A full text database subset of PsycINFO, including only 300 full-text journals that are licensed to ProQuest. Coverage is typically from 1996, with a few titles prior to that date. (Coverage does not presently include APA journals; additions to coverage occur frequently.)

• ProQuest Psychology Databases is an excellent database for locating newpaper, magazine, and journal articles on an extremely broad range of topics. Access Proquest through the E-Resource List. Consult the "Browse Topics" and "Search Tips" sections under Tools for guidance with constructing searches. While some entries provide only citation and abstract, many others are full text, including graphics (see full-page icon); some are in PDF and may be read with Adobe Acrobat (see full-page icon with camera overlay). You can expand your search by selecting Proquest Direct or by choosing to search "Multiple databases" in either Proquest database.

For a sample search on Proquest Psychology Databases, try the following:

• Select BASIC SEARCH; if you are just searching for several terms simultaneously, ADVANCED SEARCH is better.
• Using ADVANCED SEARCH, enter basketball on one line AND drug? in the next. (The ? is Proquest's truncation symbol; your search will retrieve drug, drugs, etc.) You must combine the terms using AND for the search to work properly. [NOTE: If you need to search two or more words in a phrase, then enclose them in quotation marks, as in "social studies".]
  
• Explore the pull-down options for DATABASE and DATE RANGE. To retrieve the largest number of articles, change the DATABASE line to Multiple databases and leave the DATE RANGE set at All Dates.
  
• Try limiting the results to SCHOLARLY JOURNALS, INCLUDING PEER-REVIEWED to weed out popular journal and newspaper articles. (NOTE:
• Peer-reviewed" means that an article has been screened by a panel of highly knowledgeable people in that particular subject area prior to publication. It's a quality control measure that allows you, as reader, to trust the accuracy of the author's data and conclusions.)
  
• Remove the SCHOLARLY JOURNALS limitation and instead limit by FULL TEXT ARTICLES ONLY.
• Always hit SEARCH to generate your results.
• If you retrieve either more or fewer articles than what you need, then consider reconstructing your searching by adding one or more additional search terms or modifying how you combine terms. Try using the ADVANCED SEARCH mode, where there are boxes between the lines for your search terms. Use the pull-down menu to explore how you can either broaden or limit your search by combining your terms with such options as AND, OR, AND NOT, etc.
• Notice that articles may be available online in full text-some even with graphics!-and still others may be viewed as page images, just as though you were holding the original printed page in hand. (This is useful if you need to quote something from your article and need to cite an exact page in your bibliographic notes.) Click on whichever text format you prefer to read the article online, email it to yourself, or print out a hard copy.
  
• Other entries have no icons indicating full text. For those, you will need to write down ALL of the bibliographic information for your article: the article title, the name(s) of the author(s), the journal title (in boldface type; this is the most important information!), and the date, volume, and pagination of the article. THEN…
  
• Return to The CAT and do a title search on the journal title, NOT the title of the article or the author. If PSU owns that journal, then you can get its call number and location from The CAT and read the article offline. You may also search for the article among the various E-journals at Penn State.

Education Databases (including ERIC); ERIC Databases

• Select Ask ERIC, then Topics A-Z. Click on S to find a link to Social Studies and scroll down to read about various websites related to this subject.
  
• Also try a Simple Search on social studies. This will generate a list of documents whose "call number" begins with ED (acronym for ERIC Document). For complete bibliographic information plus an abstract of the item, click on the number; then check The CAT for availability at Penn State. ERIC documents dating from before 1993 are available on microfiche in the News & Microforms Library on the ground floor of West Pattee, adjacent to MacKinnon's Café.
  
• Try searching for Nelson, Murry as AUTHOR. (NOTE: Murry Nelson will produce no results whatsoever!) You will retrieve 57 citations to his works as author or co-author.
  
• Complete information about a given item is available by clicking on the citation box and then on "view record" to see the following search fields:

  TI Title
  AU Author
  SO Source (name of journal or other publication)
  NU Other numbers (e.g. ERIC Clearinghouse, etc.)
  AB Abstract
  PY Publication year
  DE Descriptors (essentially subject headings; click on them to see citations to related articles)
  ID Identifiers (projects, etc.)
  SF Subfile (where indexed; e.g. ERIC, CIJE)
  AN Accession number

• The full text of ERIC documents dating from 1993 to the present may be accessed online. Record the full ERIC document number (ED####) for each item in which you're interested. Then search each number separately in the ERIC Document Retrieval Service (EDRS) database, part of the ERIC Databases available on the E-Resources List.

  Your initial search will produce the full bibliographic citation plus an abstract.

  • From there, you may read the document in PDF Adobe format, send it to yourself on email, store it in a temporary folder, or order it from ERIC.

Education Abstracts Full Text

• Try searching AU=Murry R Nelson. For each citation of interest, examine the full record, write down the information provided in the SOURCE (SO) field; then look up the journal title in The CAT.
  

WorldCAT (search here for books and articles not owned by Penn State)

Common Search Tips For Using Electronic Databases

Some basic principles underlie most search strategies using electronic databases. If you would like some guidance on how to construct your search, click here http://www.libraries.psu.edu/ebsl/humphreyfellowship.html#SEARCH This site offers tips on defining vocabulary, combining terms, truncating words, and limiting search results. Keep in mind that search terms vary from one database to another.

Where To Find Other Library Materials

• Videos, DVDs, and sound recordings are housed in the Music & Media Center on the second floor of West Pattee. Since those stacks are closed to the public, you will need to page the item(s) you want by giving the CAT call number(s) to the attendant on duty.
  Videos and DVDs housed in Media Technology & Support Services must be requested from that unit; the turnaround time is typically two business days.
  
• Government documents may be found in the Social Sciences Library on the second floor of Paterno Library. International, U. S., and RAND documents are all filed according to different classification systems. Ask a reference librarian at the service desk for assistance with finding your item(s).
  
• Microforms and newspapers are primarily housed in their own library in the basement of West Pattee, adjacent to MacKinnon's Café. The Social Sciences Library has many microforms of government documents in its collection as well. Both sites provide equipment with which you may read and print out copies of information on microforms.

Contact Information

Please do not hesitate to talk to a librarian at any service desk whenever you have a question. Someone will always be glad either to help you right there or to refer you to the best library for your needs. For questions specifically related to this class, contact your instructor:

Dr. Steven Herb
Education & Behavioral Sciences Library
501 Paterno Library
814-863-2141 office/814-865-2842 reference desk
slh18@psu.edu

Prepared by Ann Marie Rigler
October 2003