 All right. Well, thank you guys for joining us for our workshop today. We're going to be talking about topic selection and introduction to searching. As Allison mentioned earlier, we do have a couple of announcements. The first is that this session is being recorded. So if you unmute yourself during this first 30 minutes, your name and camera view will be included in the recording. So if you want to avoid this, please just use chat for any questions or comments until the end. And like Allison said, we'll stop recording before we get to the Q&A. Also, if you're viewing this recording later, please note that some information might have changed, not necessarily for this workshop, but in general. So just make sure you check the library for most up-to-date information. And we will get started with introductions. Allison, would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah, I can start us off. So my name is Allison Shepard. I'm an online learning librarian at UT Libraries. And my pronouns are she, her. You can reach me by email at Allison at Utk.edu after the workshop if you have questions. And I'm going to turn it over to Amber. Awesome. Thanks. I am Amber Sewell. I also use she, her pronouns. I am the teaching and learning librarian here at Hodges Library. And my email is asewell1 at Utk.edu. Please feel free to email me anytime. All right. So here's what to expect from today's workshop. We'll spend the first 30 minutes going over how to search. And then there will be half an hour after for questions or working time, say if you want to try out something that we talked about today and you'd like to have a librarian on standby to ask questions. Feel free to do that. Only the first 30 minutes of that will be recorded. And then at the end of the session, you'll have learned how to choose a topic, what Boolean operators are, and how to use them, how to choose keywords for your research, and what a search string is and how to make one. So we'll just dive right in. First, the most important part of any research assignment is choosing a topic. I have a lot of opinions on this, but essentially they all boiled down to pick something that you're interested in. If you're researching something that you think is fun and cool, everything else is going to be so much easier. I don't know about you guys, but when I was taught how to write a paper, I was essentially taught to start with a thesis statement and then go find sources that agree with that thesis statement. And this can be problematic for two big reasons. One is you're worried that there aren't going to be enough sources out there, so you pick a topic that you don't care about, like Disney princesses and how they're bad for kids. You know that there are going to be 50 million papers that agree with that thesis statement, but you don't necessarily care. Or you could pick a topic that you're really interested in and then you start researching and none of the papers agree with your statement. And then what do you do from there? Which is why I really like framing research through a research question instead. With the thesis statement, you're saying, I think this is true. And a research question, really you're posing a question and you're letting your research answer it throughout. What this really looks like is you start with your assignment. So what does your professor want? What are the constraints of the class? These are things you can't change. So if you're in an English one or two class, say myths and monsters or news and popular culture, you don't really have any control over those. And that's where the next step, your interest really comes in handy. I'm a big advocate for picking something that you're interested in, hobby, your expertise, and seeing how you can link that to your assignment. And you can do this two ways. One, you can think back to something you talked about in the class that you really thought was interesting. So for myths and monsters, I have loved dragons forever. If we talked about it in class, my research question might be, I don't know, what are physical differences between evil dragons and good dragons? I don't know the answer. I don't know if there's research on that, but that's what I want to check out. Or let's say you got totally caught up in this tiger that has escaped in Knoxville and you were like a meme creator expert. You've made awesome memes about this. It's become a hobby of yours. If you're in a news and pop culture class, there's a natural overlap. And so that makes your next step, finding your resources. I wouldn't say necessarily so much easier, but it's going to be so much more fun because you actually care what you're researching. Reading five papers about why Disney princesses are bad for little girls when you don't care about Disney is really boring. But if you really care about dragons, that research is going to be so much easier. Or maybe you know that scholarly publishing can be a slow process. You're not going to find scholarly articles about this tiger escaping in Knoxville. But you know that this has happened before and you can find scholarly articles about other times that it's happened and used, say, those primary sources to tie everything together. And that really leads to a cool new product. You are what tied everything together. If you follow this process, nobody else could have written the paper that's going to come out of this if you are pairing your interest with the assignment. A professor would so much rather read something off the wall that the student clearly loved rather than 50 of the same papers because people thought it was an easy topic. And as a librarian, my favorite thing is when students are really into a topic and then they come to me and ask for help. It is so much fun. So the next thing we're going to talk about is choosing keywords. And typically after you choose the topic, the next step you'll want to complete is deciding what words you want to search for. So keywords are really just the main ideas or words surrounding your topic. So you can ask yourself questions like, what is the main idea of this? What words would I use to describe this topic to someone else and make note of all of those words? If you can go to the next slide, please. Now, if you need some help deciding on what keywords to use, there are a lot of different ways to do this. And use keywords or words that you would use to describe the topic. If you were talking to someone about it, ask someone else what keywords they would use for your topic. Also, if you're just getting started and kind of deciding on your topic, it's really good to Google your topic and see what keywords come up there. And you can also use something like Wikipedia to do a little bit of background reading. And I will say Wikipedia can be edited by basically anyone. So you don't want to cite that information, but it can be a good starting spot just to get some background information on your topic. You can also find some synonyms for your words if you use an online thesaurus or even a physical thesaurus. And if you're into using databases, oftentimes they will have a thesaurus included in those as well. And thesaurus will just find words that mean the same thing as the word that you're using. Sometimes if you're searching and you're using one keyword, like say tiger, for example, but you're not finding anything, you might have to slightly alter your search or use synonyms. There's not really a great synonym for tiger, aside from like using the scientific name, but you could get more general and just say big cats. Or if you decide that that search isn't working for you, you could change directions entirely and talk about a different animal. So you could switch to cougars or lions. So there's a lot of different directions you can go with keywords. I usually find that making a list and having that on like my desk with me when I'm doing searching makes it a little bit easier. And when you're searching, if you try one search and it doesn't work with the keywords you're using, if you try switching out some of those keywords, you're going to get different results. Also too, if you're not really sure where to start with your keywords or you're searching and you're still not getting anything for the assignment that you're working on, reach out to your librarian for help. We're here to help with that part of the process too. Awesome. So once you have your keywords, you got to put them together in some form or fashion. And this is where Boolean operators come together. It's just a fancy word for and or and not. And I'm going to briefly tell you how they all work together with your keywords. So let's say you're really interested in this target that's escaped. And so basic search you could do would be tiger and escape. So when you put that into a database, like one search or academic search complete, this is kind of what it looks like. So you've got everything that's ever been published about tigers that we have access to, all of the things about escape. But because you've used and it's only going to show you results for things that have both of those words in them. So there's tons of stuff about tigers that won't show up, but using and tells the database you want both of these things for it to be relevant. There's also or and this is a good place to use the synonyms. So if you're searching either something that has multiple names or you want to try different variations or can be great. So like with this tiger that escaped, some people from the zoo said people might have seen a cougar. So maybe I want to look at tiger or cougar escapes. And what this looks like is it's got everything about tigers, everything about cougars, anything that has both and I'm getting all of those results. So this is a good way to expand results if you're not getting enough. And lastly, we have not. This can be good. Say I'm doing a lot of research about big cats, but I keep getting things about lions and I don't care about lions or a lot of the articles for some reason might mention tigers but are mostly about lions and it's getting super frustrating. I can use not to get rid of anything that mentions lions. So not only the bulk of information but anything that mentions tigers and lions. I'm not going to get it. I'm only going to get that information that just mentions tigers. We often say use this with caution because sometimes this information in the middle can be valuable. But there are times where say if you're looking at different sports and you keep getting the one that doesn't matter or different countries, this can be a useful one to use. So the next part we're going to talk about just briefly is constructing a search string. And a search string is really just what you type into the search box whether you're searching in Google or the one search or if you're using one of our databases. So it's the combination of the keywords that you're using, those Boolean operators, and any other information that you're searching for like an author name or a date. So here are just a few examples of search strings you could use to talk about the topic of the tiger escape. You can do tiger and escape to look for articles that include information about both of those words. So anything that just has information about one of those won't show up in the search. It has to have both. And make your, will make your search more narrow. So you're going to get fewer items the more that you use and. Now you can continue adding more Boolean operators to your search string by making it longer. I've included an example of that next. So tiger and escape and zoo. If you just wanted to look at tigers that escape from the zoo. Now in the report last week they knew it wasn't from Knoxville Zoo. They're not really sure where it came from. So this probably wouldn't be the search you would do to look at articles on that when they're available. Now the search string that I've got at the bottom is a little bit more complicated. Now when you're trying to search for articles or other resources and you're not getting enough results something I usually recommend that people do is include some of those synonyms or other keywords that you can use. Now let's say we're getting a lot of articles about escapes from zoos for animals. But maybe we're not getting enough just for tigers specifically. Maybe we want to expand it to include other big cats as well. So you'll see that I've included in parentheses at the start of the search string. Tiger or lion or cheetah or big cat in quotations. What this tells my search to do is search for everything that's in the parentheses first. So any of these words can show up in the article and I want to see them. But it also has to include escape and zoo. So any articles that pop up will include escape and zoo but they also have to include one of those first words in the parentheses as well. You'll notice I also put quotation marks around big cat. And that's because I want to search for that as a phrase. When you do that in a database or Google or one search it's telling the search engine that you're using. I need these words to appear together. So if I just search for big cat separately without the quotation marks big might be on the first page of the article. Cat might be somewhere else. But if you put quotations around it those words have to appear together for it to show up in your search. That's just one way you can conduct search strings. They can get pretty long. You also don't have to type the Boolean operators in all caps like we have here in most databases. But I do it because it makes it easier for me to see where the words are separated and it makes it easier to switch things out. So these are just a few examples. Your search will look entirely different depending on what your topic is. But if you have any help figuring out just let us know. Right. And that is just a very quick run through of how to get started with searching. Make sure to make it fun or something you're interested in if at all possible. And then the basics of getting started. We do have our survey here. We'll drop a link in chat. We would greatly appreciate it if you would fill that out. Also if you need proof of attendance for attending this webinar either live or for the recording. Filling out the survey will give you that. And then please join us next Wednesday for our workshop on finding primary sources. I'll be there helping with that one as well. All right. And I will go ahead and stop the recording so we can begin our Q&A session.