ENED7001 Introduction to Engineering Education and Research

• Look at theses/dissertations at UC, and in OhioLINK (keyword search and limit material type to thesis)
• Look at books, reviews, encyclopedias and handbooks to get background information
• Check out faculty or researchers whose names you know and see what they are doing in databases and web sites
   
• Use a "funnel" approach to narrow your topic
  • name a broad area > name a subarea > name a specific topic within the subarea
  • what aspect to look at: theory, application, design, material, construction process, function, use data
  • what are your independent variables? your dependent variables?

Use these tips to begin your research:

1. Identify keywords
   • Library search tools don't respond well to natural language searching (where you type in your whole question or sentence) instead, you need to identify only the most important words (keywords) in your research question or topic.
2. Think of synonyms and related terms:
   • Library search tools are built to find exact matches so a search for "students" will only find resources with that term and won't find resources with the term "learners" even though they might be relevant to your topic. To ensure that you're not missing important information, take some time to think about synonyms and related terms for each of your keywords.
3. Decide where to begin your search and try the suggested databases in this guide.
4. Build a search query:
   • Create a search set of synonyms (use "OR" operator) for a concept
   • Combine search sets for concepts with "AND" operator
   • use quote marks " " to identify a phrase
   • Use truncation and wild cards to expand based on a word stem (e.g., nano* )
5. Narrow your results:
   • Use refine or limit features to narrow your search results by date, material type, treatment, etc.
6. Examine search result record to see what subjects have been assigned (if any) to the record.
7. Try citation searching
   • Expand to related articles with shared citations
   • Use citation searching and browsing features, including sorting by # of times cited (Web of Science, SciFinder, Google Scholar, etc). 

• Use Full Text Journals to search for full-text sources by journal title.
• Search by journal title in the Library Catalog.

PRO TIP: before submitting in ILLiad, search for the article in Google Scholar.  Some authors post the article in an open access repository.  Use Google's "All x versions" link to see available options.

Link to available full-text articles with one click by downloading the libraries newly-subscribed browser extension, LibKey Nomad. You will be prompted to log in with your UC username and password as needed.

• Download Nomad at www.libkeynomad.com.  (Available for Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Vivaldi and Brave browsers)
• After download, enter University of Cincinnati as your institution.  More details: https://thirdiron.com/products/libkey-nomad/.

When the browser extension is installed and full-text is available, you will see a prompt in the lower-left side of your browser screen - “Download PDF”, “Article Link”, or “Manuscript Link”.  

If you see an “Access Options” prompt, full-text may not be available at UC and you will can select another route (e.g., interlibrary loan).

Please note: When you see “Access Options”, locate the UC Article Linker button for that reference citation to ensure the best results in accessing existing full text or requesting the article.  The UC Article Linker button may be visible in the summary view or the full record view of the reference citation. For some databases, the button will not be visible and you may see “Link to full text” instead.

Nomad Extension works with Google Scholar

As you may know, you can search Google Scholar and connect to UC-subscribed full-text articles.  You will need to configure Google Scholar UC Libraries access.

Nomad works with Google Scholar.  Instead of seeing “Find Full Text at UC”, you may see “[PDF]” or “[HTML]” and the journal or publisher web address.