 Hello, my name is Sherry Saines. I'm a subject librarian for the social sciences at Alden Library at Ohio University. Today we're going to do an article deep dive. We're going to go to the database Scopus. Look at one article description and find out what all is there that will help us find even more stuff. We're going to go to Scopus. Scopus is a database of articles, one of hundreds that we subscribe to. It's set up to be especially good at making the connections between scholarship, which is why we are using it in this article. So you find it by searching for the name of the database, Scopus, on the library homepage. When you open, you may need to log in before it gets to this point. I've already typed in the article that I want to investigate with you. Here it is, Reconciling Religion and LGBT Rights. And we're going to find that article by searching and it comes right up. So let's open the article record. This is the description of the article and Scopus gives us lots of really good clues where to go from here. First let's look at what's here. We're going to look at the seven signals of significance. The first signal, journal, title, author, publication, info, date. All of that is always right up on top. The first question is, is this on our topic? We're going to assume that it is. We're going to assume that our topic is covered by this article. So the title sounds good. Publication itself might be an indicator of importance. So if social currents is a journal that we're aware of, we could say, oh, this was published in social currents. Secondly, we have the author themselves, Jay Cooley in this case. We want to know who this person is. Here are their credentials. They're from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology in Longmouth College. Well that's good. This is an anthropologist or a sociologist and that's the point of view I was considering in my question. They're hired by a university. That's a credential. They can still be wrong. They can still make mistakes. We still have to come up with this article with our brain turned on, of course, but Jay Cooley has some credentials that we can lean on. Another question is, can I name this person's intersectional identity? It is often hard to discover this unless the author does so on purpose. This has happened increasingly in social science writing and seeking out diverse authors can be a strength in our own. The third signal of the significance is what's in the abstract. I want to read this abstract. It's going to give me a clue about whether this article is something I really want to spend time on. It usually covers the basic ideas, methods, and conclusions from the article. Note the diction. I can understand this but hear this quote from another article I was looking at. Epidema II shows Neanderthal-like features, a continuous thick and rounded super orbital tourist with no break between the glabalar orbital and lateral regions. A lack of break in plane between the glabalar and lateral regions and superior view and etc. I don't understand that abstract. Does it mean I shouldn't read it? Not necessarily but it does show us that an article in an academic journal might very well be using diction or jargon that is a little bit beyond us. We are gradually learning the language of the field and we hope that by the time we're a senior abstracts like these make complete sense. The fourth signal of significance are these keywords. We want to track keywords. We want to make sure that we have written down every possible way of saying the most important ideas on our topic and these author keywords are some of them. So the author says some of the most important ideas in my article are culture wars, LGBT rights, social movements, and etc. That's very interesting. We might not have known that. Right under the author's keywords are the Seindal topics. This database has its own set of subject headings that are assigned by human beings which group like articles together very precisely. These topics are clickable and that brings us to the topic analysis page. The topic analysis page has more things we can delve into. It has representative documents. Look it says here are some more articles that seem to have the same set of subject headings as the one you were reading. We might want to read these. Then it says here are some of the top authors. Here are some of the people who were working in this field on this topic. All of these are clickable and we can go discover what they have written. At the bottom is a word cloud. This gives me even more words to track, more ideas about related and important terms having to do with my topic. In a word cloud the words with the biggest text are the ones that occur more frequently. In this particular word cloud the blue words are in decline are being used less often and the green words are being used more often between 2016 and 2020. This is really really helpful if I'm tracking a new topic or a topic in which the terminology is not yet changed, not yet settled. This gives me some clues. The fifth signal of significance is the funders. This particular article doesn't have the funders listed. That's probably because many social science research gets done without being funded by associations or the government the way most science is funded. Many social science researchers like Jay Cooley obviously did their work on their own. If the funders were listed we would want to be watching for conflicts of interest. What if a toothpaste company paid for toothpaste research? That was kind of obvious but some connections are not as clear. If we are suspicious we could use Google to dig into the author or the funding agency. Be aware that even if the author is not funded by others there are many costs involved in doing research. There's personal time and institutional time. There are materials, GAs, that sort of thing. Much unpaid labor goes into academic articles. The sixth signal of significance is over here related documents. This is like more like this on Amazon right? We like this. You might like this. Oh you might like this. You might like this. These are more articles we can invest in. After we've done all this looking we're probably ready to go see if we can find the full text. If everything is checked out so far we're going to run over here and look at the full text. In this case I'm finding it on the lib key link and here is the whole article. The abstract and the keywords are repeated and now we can read the introduction. We can skim the methods. We can fast forward to the conclusions and say well yes actually this is something. Yeah this is really good. I need to read this in depth. Back at the article description I want to show you three more places we're going to dig in a little deeper. We're going to do this in class in discussion but I want to show you where these places are so you can find them. The first is the reference list which is the bibliography or the citations at the end of the article. This shows us where got their information, what they read, what informed their work. The second place is the cited by documents. So this article is written in 2017 and after 2017 19 other people thought this article was important enough to include in their reference list so that's these people. 19 documents here. The third place we're going to investigate is the metrics. The metrics measure the importance of the article by a bunch of different philosophical numbers and percentiles. What we're going to look at though is the Plumex details. The Plumex details follow this article through social media and news and that sort of thing. So it says one mention in news and if I click out I can read it and it was tweeted 14 times and if I click out I can read them. So that shows us that the article is being read, tweeted, passed on, and used by many different people. Everything we've learned about the scientific process applies to the social sciences as well as the heart sciences. We often think of social science research being more qualitative and quantitative but all the same rigor applies and here we can see it in the description of the article and the many places that can take us.