Using EBSCO for Help with Citation Management

http://www.alvernia.edu/library


Go to Article Databases and select one of the EBSCO databases such as Education Research Complete. EDUCATION -- EBSCO

Using Advanced Search, you can probably find a good list of 10-20 full- text articles on a solid research topic and narrow it down enough to see the trends in the research.

Note that you can print, email, and save your results. Note also that after several searches you can use the "History" feature to see what you have searched and go back to previous results or combine searches. I suggest you save and email results so that you will have electronic files to document your work. We all forget what we have done and found almost as soon as our fingers leave the keys. Keep your results electronically even if you print some. You don't want to have to enter data more than once.

Enter the name of a scholar in the field and see what you find. I'm using Brenda Dervin for the workshop and also one of her dissertation students. Dr. Dervin, Ohio State, has developed and used a research theory and method called "sense-making" for several decades. I think that her work will serve as a good example for our workshop. I've chosen Dervin and sense-making for illustration because (1.) Dervin is well-established and works with the level of theory and with the methodologies most likely to be use or at least understood by students in our program in leadership studies; (2.) Sense-making as a theory and a method is used by students in a wide variety of disciplines and particularly in professional, action-oriented research; (3.) Dervin and sense-making are not so popular that as terms are the easiest to find so I can illustrate some of the subtleties in searching the electronic resources in scholarly communication.

You should be able to find "Dervin, Brenda" and "sense-making" in all of our social science databases, in Google Scholar, and in the academic regions of the web.