 Hi, welcome to today's library workshop. Let's get subject specific, how to navigate subject specific databases and developing effective keywords. My name is Carissa Powell. I use she, her, her pronouns and I am the student success librarian for information literacy. I work with a lot of first year composition students. And if you have any questions you can email me at Carissa at utk.edu. And my name is Breanne Dosh. I am primarily the subject librarian for psychology majors and faculty. And so that means when people have a subject specific question I'm the one that they come to. I also help people find data in the social sciences and I work with everyone from first year students to grad students to faculty members. And so also if you have a question, subject specific or not, you can email me at thedosh at utk.edu. This is what we're going to get into today. I'm gonna walk you through finding and using subject specific databases and also show you how to get in contact with your subject librarian. Cause believe it or not, I'm not the only subject librarian here at UTK. And then Carissa is gonna walk us through the best way that you can develop keywords and synonyms when you are doing searches and your own research when you're in databases. So my first question for you that we're gonna do an activity for is I wanna know where you guys go when you want to deep dive into a topic. And deep dive, I put a little dictionary snapshot there is an in-depth examination or analysis of a topic. And so Amber is gonna drop our link to this padlet in the chat and I'm gonna ask these questions of where do you go when you deep dive into a topic? What's after Wikipedia, essentially? And I'd like to know kind of where you start or where you go to find experts on a topic. Ooh, Ebsco, that's a good one. Ooh, Google Scholar. Wikipedia is a great place to start. JSTOR. Ooh, Liaison Guides. That's another word for subject librarians. I love that. You're right. I feel like there are experts on, like you can start and end kind of in the same place. Man, you guys are like advanced. Ooh, Finding an Exactlypedia. I think that that's a really great place to go because you kind of wanna know what the experts are saying or define different terms that you know or don't know. Ooh, Web of Science is one of my favorites. We're actually gonna dig into that a little bit today and annotated bibliographies are also a really good place to go. Thank you guys for sharing all of that. Those are awesome suggestions. Well, what's great in academic research, the places that we go most frequently are databases which is what we're gonna talk about with getting subjects specific. And so the definition of a database is a collection or index of resources with full text citations and abstracts. And a lot of times that's where people go to find peer-reviewed journal articles on a topic, kind of some things written by experts. And you guys gave me lots of really good examples but some examples I put up there is academic search complete, psych info and a Web of Science. So I'm gonna walk you through how to find our subject specific databases from the library homepage and show you just walk you through what I do when I'm getting subject specific with a student when I'm helping them with some searches. So our main library homepage, you haven't been here before, is lib.utk.edu and it's the great place to start always for your searches. Now, instead of going to one search, I'm gonna show you how to find our databases. So here we are, we have our one search search bar, you can see our hours, all the normal stuff. But here under research tools, I'm gonna click on this button that says databases. And it's gonna take you to this great guide that I love and it's articles and databases by subject. And you can scroll down and see what there is offered on your subject. So let's say I'm interested in chemistry. I'm gonna click and it's gonna show me that we have 20 databases found for chemistry. Now that is a lot of databases. And that's why we have these little best bets boxes at the top. And what that means is the subject librarian in this area has decided for most research questions, these are gonna be your best bets of where to start. And I'd also like to point out over here that this is how you find your subject librarian. This is Teresa Berry, she's the subject librarian for chemistry and you are welcome to email her for any of your chemistry related questions. You can also scroll down and see more of the databases, but you can also see the guides that your subject librarian has created to give you more information. And so that's an example of how you can find our databases. So I'm gonna do that one more time for, I'm at lib.utk.edu and I'm gonna go to psychinfo, which is the database that I refer a lot of my students do. So I'm gonna click on databases and I'm gonna scroll down to psychology right here. Oh, and look, there I am. You can book an appointment with me or email me and like your best bet is gonna be psychinfo. And this is where we go when we're getting subject specific and we're looking for experts on the topic. So I'm gonna go ahead and click on psychinfo. And sometimes it'll take you to this basic search. I really like to do advanced search because it helps me string my keywords together a little bit better. So an example of kind of going from a wide, like a broad topic to a narrow topic is one of the most frequent research requests I get is students wanna research mental health and college students, which I think is a great topic to research, especially when you are a college student. And so I'm just gonna go ahead and type in college students and mental health. And when I just string it together like that on these two rows, it means it's looking for anything that talks about college students and mental health. And I'm gonna click search and see what happens. Okay, I got over 19,000 results. And scrolling through it, there might be some things, okay, mental resilience enhances the wellbeing of college students. There might be some things that I could go through, but over 19,000 results when I'm trying to get subject specific is a little too much. So I'm actually gonna leave my database open in this tab and I'm gonna go over and I'm actually gonna Google to see what kind of specific mental health issue I wanna get into with college students. So I'm gonna Google types of mental health issues in college students and see kind of what ideas or more subject specific ideas I can come up with. This one looks good. The top mental health challenges facing students. And so from here I can see, I wonder what happens if I research a specific type of mental illness or mental health issue with the word college students and see if that gets me anything more subject specific so I don't have to scroll through so much. So let's go back and try that. I'm gonna go back to my advanced search. I'm also gonna do a subject librarian trick where I'm going to put quotation marks around college students because I wanna tell the database that I want the words college students together when I'm searching with the term depression. Now let's see if that gives me anything more specific. Wow, it took me down by 10,000 results. I feel like that is a pretty helpful way where I am using Google and figuring out what kind of issues with mental health issues that the scholars are talking about. Kind of, I have this general topic that I'm interested in and I'm trying to drill it down to that subject specific narrow topic. But you know, I'm gonna go back to that page and I think I can narrow it down even further. So I'm gonna go back to what I Googled. I'm gonna click on depression and let's see. I'm looking at different symptoms. What am I interested in as a researcher? These are just kind of questions that I'm asking myself as I'm getting subject specific. I see changes in sleep habits, sadness, thinking symptoms. You know what? I think I'm interested in how depression impacts the sleep of students. So I'm gonna go back. I'm gonna go back to advanced search. What's great is it kept what I had, right? It kept my college students and my quotation marks that I'm telling the database to look exactly for that. It kept depression and now I'm gonna add a row and I'm going to add sleep. Just a simple keyword and see what comes up. I am down to 300 results and I feel like that's a pretty good place for me to start looking at the snippets that I'm getting, the titles, the abstracts, the subject headings to see kind of what I'm interested in and if I've gotten subject specific enough with my keywords to get what I need for my class, for my research interests, whatever brought me to where the experts are. So this one looks really interesting because I see words like chronotype that I really don't know what it is, but it seems like it has to do with sleep quality in college students in their first year. So I'm gonna go ahead and click on the article. And I see from its major subjects that it mentions depression, sleep and college students. I think I'm in a really good place. And this is kind of where you wanna get when you get subject specific. You might start in Google and you might start with Wikipedia, but you can drill down and you can end up with an article that will give you even more things to search and kind of be that key to open up the rest of your subject specific research. So if this were me, I would find the full text and read it and see what kind of ideas where I could get even more subject specific to do some more searches. And so that is my demonstration for psych info and ways that you can get subject specific even when you just have a general topic that you're interested in. I also wanna show you guys in another database that will look kind of, that will look familiar to those of you who have used Web of Science before and it's probably one of the databases that you guys will use a lot. So I'm gonna go back to our library homepage and I'm gonna go back to our little databases guide. And I have a biology question about climate change. That is also one of the number one things that people develop research questions on, but climate change is kind of broad. So we're gonna drill that down to try to get subject specific. So I'm here, I'm gonna click on biological sciences. Oh, look, I see my best bets. There are 24 databases, but I don't have to click on each one. I can trust that my subject librarian has picked the best bets for me. And I can also see if I'm not successful or I really struggle in this process or not even really struggle, just have questions, I can get in contact with my biology subject librarian. And I have to say Donna is one of the best librarians here. So if you have a biology question, I recommend reaching out to her. So I'm gonna click on the first bet, best bet, which is biological abstracts. And I'm gonna click on it and wait for it to open. All right, so I'm here, it's telling me this is Web of Science, but searching biological abstracts within Web of Science, which is also why it's important to kind of navigate your searches from the database pages because it will narrow down the areas of Web of Science that you're searching. Because Web of Science is a database that is ginormous and covers all types of disciplines. So it's good to click on the links that your subject librarians have put together for you. So I'm just gonna go ahead and do a simple search of climate change and see what Web of Science has to say about that. All right, this has given me over 100,000 results. I think that I need to be a little bit more subject specific if it's gonna be easier for me to come up with a research question and see what I wanna write about. So I'm gonna go back to my search and before Googling, I know from my own interests that coral reefs have something to do with climate change. So I'm gonna search coral reef and I'm gonna link it together with that big and. So I'm telling the database that I'm looking for anything that talks about coral reefs and climate change. And I'm gonna see what it does. All right, it took me down to like around 1500 results, which I think is a lot more navigable where you can start clicking on things and seeing what you're interested in. From here, you could Google like challenges of coral reefs, let's Google coral reef damage. Cause I know that climate change and coral reef damage has something to do with each other. So let Google is really helpful. It's telling me that it suffers physical damage. So I'm gonna click on this one cause it sounds interesting to me and I wanna know what more it has to say. And again, from here, I can see, oh, they're called rainforests of the sea. Oh, this is really cool. It's telling me different parts of the coral that I might be able to search. But then I also see that some of the threats to the coral race has to do from pollution just from skimming it. So this is ways that you can skim and find keywords that you can bring back to the database to then get more subjects specific. So let's try to add pollution to our search and see what it does. So I'm gonna go back to my search. Gonna use that handy dandy little and again. I'm gonna click search. All right, it took me down to 150 results. Now that is pretty like, you don't have to read 150 papers, but that's a lot easier to skim and to go through and to see what subject specific approach you wanna take to this research question. And that's really what I wanted to show you was how to get subject specific and really what we're trying to do through the Googling that I did and finding the links from the database pages is I was showing you how to take kind of the common sense language that you use and see how the database is referring to it and how researchers and the experts are referring to it. And so with that, now Carissa is gonna talk about how you can kind of take those research questions and ideas and develop great keywords that can help you navigate and get the right results from these databases. Hi, thank you so much, Brian. I loved all of those things. So keywords, I think probably a lot of us have heard that term thrown around a little bit and I just wanted to break down that concept if you've never heard of it before or if you just need a refresh. Keywords are words that represent the main concept. So something that I do with a lot of students is I have them write down their full research question and then because it's not a great idea to plug that entire research question into a database, what are the words that you would circle that really represent what your question is trying to get it? And I'll give some examples of this in just a minute, but I think that's a great way of just thinking about what a keyword is. And with that, we also talk about what synonyms are. So if our research question, which I'll give an example of in a minute is about education, another way of saying students could be children or teens or different populations of students, like high school students. And a great place to start thinking about synonyms, especially if you're really struggling with this is Credo Reference is one of my favorite tools. It is just a really interesting place to help you brainstorm other ways of, especially if you've done a search in a database and you're just not finding what you're looking for, maybe you're hitting a bit of a, I don't know, hitting a bit of a wall, if we type in the word student and see what pops up. What I really love is this little like little word map off to the right. So it can give you some different ways of thinking about the word student. So maybe you hadn't thought about the differences between higher education versus university. Like those are two ways of talking about college students without saying the word college. So I really recommend this as a resource to just kind of give you a place to go brainstorm. Additionally, I also love just googling the word you're thinking of and the word synonym, seeing what pops up. I personally do this all the time. Similarly for, I think a couple of people talked about Wikipedia in the Padlet. Wikipedia is also a great place, especially if it's a topic that you're maybe like not as familiar with, especially some industry terms, there's just different ways of saying the same thing. Additionally, you can also ask a librarian for help. So you can always, we'll show you how to ask for help at the end of this, but we're also a great resource to brainstorm some different ways of searching if you're not getting where you're looking for. So if you have heard of Boolean operators before, that is awesome. If you have not, this is a really amazing visual representation. So Boolean operators are a code that you use to speak to the database, essentially. They also work on Google, they work on a lot of search engines. So if you wanted both concepts in your search result, you would use and. And so education and college students would appear in your search result. Or is used mostly for your synonyms. So if we're thinking about education or college student, you might get both, you might get one or the other. Who knows? And maybe you're doing a lot of research and realize that you're searching for students, but you're getting a ton of results about high school. So to kick that out of your search results, you would use the Boolean operator in that. And it would stop appearing in your search results. So those are just a few overview of how to use Boolean operators. And how that would look in a search stream is like this. So into the database, into one search, wherever you're searching, you could type in education and college students. Education and college students and stress. Or you could put your synonyms and little brackets. So those are just a few examples of what that would look like when you type that into your search. So I would love to have us practice right now. So we're gonna do an additional padlet. Amber has just put it in chat. And so if everyone could go to that padlet link, I would love to hear a research question maybe you're working on right now or what some of your keywords are. So maybe you have your keywords, but not your research questions. Maybe you have your research questions, not your keywords, it could be all over the place. This also does not have to be super definite. Like maybe it's something you're just thinking about or something you would like to be doing. So I would love to hear what folks are working on. And again, that link is in chat. So take a minute or two, take your time. And again, this is not like we're not grading this. This is just for folks on the workshop to have an example of what these look like. And I can see that someone is typing, so definitely take your time. So I see some folks are working on, oh, they're all coming in now. I can see that someone is working about embedded reporters in war scenarios. Are those ethical? We've got folks researching sex workers in crime, social media and infographic and minorities. Is music education valuable in K through 12? And so what I see some folks doing is what I was hoping would happen is that you're taking your research question and then showing the keywords on the other side. And then for folks, if you see something you would like to add a synonym to that, that would be super helpful, especially maybe if you don't have a topic yet. Something I like to do in class, which is a little harder here on Zoom, is that I like to have folks write down their keywords and then switch with a classmate and have the classmate write down synonyms. And if you want to do this with a roommate, if you ever get stuck on your research on coming up with synonyms, this is also a great practice. So I will leave this up. You can continue to look at this after today. And it's just a great way to... It's a great practice, especially if you're starting with your research, to list out your research question. Think about some of your keywords. And again, if you get stuck on any of those, you can always reach out to a librarian and that is something we do, which is help talk through some of these concepts. And I can show you guys how to get in contact with a librarian. So I'm gonna take us back. Also, you guys did such a great job. Like I am interested in all of these topics and I kind of wanna go do some searches now. So thank you for inspiring me. So I'm gonna go back to our library homepage, which is lib.utk.edu. Oh, and Amber is just on top of it, dropping it in the chats. So the number one place that you can come to get help, which I just, is the chat with us button. So I think I'm only sharing my browser instead of my whole screen. So let me share my whole screen so I can show it with you guys. All right, so if I click this chat with us button, can you guys see this little chat box that popped up? Thank you, Alyssa. So I can type in my name, my emails. They can get back in touch with me later. I can say who I am. And my question is gonna be, can you say hi to our library class? I'm gonna start the chat. And oh, please wait, a librarian will connect shortly. Hi, Amy is joined. And this is just great, cause you can, I'm on chat sometimes, Chris is on chat. This is a time where you can just go back and forth and ask some questions. Like I need resources on mental health and college students. And it can be this back and forth conversation. And what's great is from this chat with us now, if you're needing to get subject specific or it's really tricky and you guys just aren't coming up with anything, they're able to refer you to your subject librarian. And again, the best way to get in contact with your subject librarian is by email. And the best way to find them is to come to the A through Z database, click on your topic, like psychology. And then look, I have a book now button, not all the librarians do, but you can book an appointment directly with me or this will give you my email address. But you don't have to poke around in the dark with keywords, you can always email a librarian for help. So thank you guys. Chris, I think you're muted. I feel like there's a bingo card for that. Next week's workshop is about how to use the studio. Creativity made simple. If you've ever wondered about some of the resources at the studio, please join. It's gonna be great. If you need proof of attendance for today's workshop, we would love for you to fill out the link in chat. Amber has also put the link to register for next week's workshop in chat. We would also love for you to fill out the survey, even if you don't need proof of attendance, we would love to hear what stood out to you, what is still confusing, et cetera, et cetera. So the link to that is in chat as well. So thank you again for attending. We're gonna turn off the recording and we're here for questions.