How do the (college) kids these days do research for school?

In My Humble Opinion
1

When I went to college in the late '80s and early '90s, you had to physically go to a library and get some damn books or whatever on the subject on which you were doing your research paper. So I feel completely like a fish out of water in the class I’m taking now. I could still do it the old-fashioned way but am hesitant to go in person if I don’t have to, but I can’t seem to get the hang of finding actual scholarly research online.

Everything is either too old or so lawyerly that I think it’s TOO scholarly for this purpose. I am so confused and I can’t start writing because I can’t find the research I need!

2

You need to contact your school’s library system and find out what resources you have access to with your student credentials. Lots of institutions have subscriptions to academic research databases.

Here’s a list of databases, many of which are free or at least have some free material.

3

What books or articles are you having trouble finding or accessing? Newer material should be easier to find digitally than something that has been sitting in some basement for 70 years and has not been scanned in.

4

This is the right answer, but I’d also recommend making an appointment for a tutorial on searching the databases with a reference librarian. Most schools offer students this service for free, and they often have options for remote students these days. Or, alternately, make an appointment with your professor during office hours (which will probably also be offered online if it’s an online course) and ask them which databases they recommend using for your research topic and whether they can give you a quick tutorial. You’re paying for access to people as well as databases, and most of us are delighted when students actually take us up on it.

I expect the OP may be looking for stuff that is freely available on the web – which means, mostly, very old books and articles that are in the public domain, plus a few open-access journals. Don’t do that. The good stuff is usually behind a paywall, but you are already paying for access through your student fees. If the university doesn’t have a subscription to the right database, you can use interlibrary loan. If it exists and you’re a student enrolled at a higher ed institution, you can almost certainly access it for free.

5

As long ago as 2002, large universities (esp. those in university systems) already had pretty much every academic journal and most of their periodicals online- both recent and historical. IIRC, they’d subscribed to some service that did it instead of doing it in-house.

And many books themselves were online as well. When I was in graduate school (2002-2003), I visited the library, but the majority of the research was done online through the library’s online resources. I imagine it’s even more that way today.

6

Thanks so much for everyone’s replies! I have been trying to search my college’s online library, but I keep bringing things up that are unsuitable. Cites need to be no more than 3 years old, and since the subject is about copyright and fair use on the web and I’m US based, it needs to be from/about US fair use law. This would be more for non-lawyers who are working in digital media, not lawyers or instructors.

I have made an appointment with a librarian for Monday, so hopefully that will get me started on the right track. The instructor said we could use Google Scholar, but I don’t get it because I’m an old! I’m not paying $40 for an article that I don’t even know is going to help me. And when I try to search my college’s library online, I can’t seem to get the search parameters to work for me. I’m a raw beginner to digital media, so maybe that is some of my problem.

But apparently making a librarian appointment is perfectly standard, so that’s what I am doing. This assignment only has to be 250 words, so I should be able to write it in a jiffy, but it is taking me DAYS to figure out the research for it. Was NOT expecting that. I hope they can help me use these resources more efficiently.

7

FWIW my public library system also has those connections to research resources. They are also happy to do tutorials with patrons coaching how to use those resources, so consider using the public library as well.

8

I graduated from college last year. Our library had an online portal you could use to search for scholarly articles from various sources (e.g., EBSCOhost, JSTOR, etc.). You didn’t have to be logged in to perform the searches, but you could only access the content of the articles if you logged in via your student account (you could still view abstracts and publication info). Some sort of technical wizardry was working behind the scenes so that by being logged in, I was automatically granted access to these articles at their various online sources. It was convenient.

I think your librarian appointment will be helpful. Some schools even include a quick tutorial on gathering research either as a distinct course for all students (like at my community college) or as part of a gen ed course (like at my 4-year college, where it was part of introductory writing).

9

Google Scholar

10

I second this.

I finished undergrad in ‘93, when nothing (much) was online. When I got my M.A. in English (‘08), my program actually had a required 3-credit class that was all about how to do research and write research papers. It was hugely useful. While writing my thesis I did spend some time in the library, but the vast majority of my research was done online.

11

I’m able to sign into my college library’s website to search, but the search functions seem awkward to me and the parameters keep changing to take away my search filters, like years 2019-2022. There must be something I’m missing!

I’m going to check my closest public library also. I serendipitously have some time off from work this week, so maybe I can get over there at a quiet time of day.

12

Consider calling ahead of time to ask if an appt to sit down with a librarian to be tutored on available resources and methods could be made. Some days and times may be less busy and therefore easier-that’s how my local branch does it. My library doesn’t care, much less ask, if you have a library card. They are thrilled, however if you’re a student from out of town who wants to sign up for a non-resident card.

13

AFAIK, every scholarly article published in the last 20 years is available online and all college libraries subscribe to them, so all students and staff have access. I once found a paper from 1840 that had been scanned and posted online. And every paper I wrote is posted on my web site.

14

That’s a good idea. I’d better call ahead.

15

I have also run into the OP’s problem for a project i’m working on.

My concern is that online research, although great, is changing the nature of the library. With a card catalogue, everything was free. Anyone could access it, without being a student or a prof.

Now it’s paywalled. If I go to the university library, and I’m not a student or a prof, access is paywalled. It seems to me that the online research is actually an obstacle to the free exchange of information and research.

16

I just retired from a 41 year career as a master’s prepared medical librarian and I spent at least 20 years debunking this. Not everything’s available online, academic libraries do not subscribe to every journal, and what’s online is not always free. Librarians are your friend. Librarians can teach you what databases to search and how to search them. Every database has limiters that let you narrow your search by date, language, etc. If the library doesn’t have an article you want, the librarian can order the article from another library. This
is called interlibrary loan and can be used to get books from other libraries. There may or may not be a charge to the student.

I spent many years doing bibliographic instruction, which is a fancy term for how to use the library.

17

Besides the great examples mentioned already, consider Wikipedia.

[All dopers toss a shoe] -“bonk” Ow!-

But no, really, it is not the Wikipedia articles you should look at, you look at the cites:

Hey, everybody. So, in the months since I’ve put up the Dionysus video, I’ve gotten a few emails from people asking about my sources and my process and all that jazz, and around the third time I had to answer one of those emails, I had a sudden epiphany:

“Maybe this process isn’t as intuitive as I thought…”

So today I’m gonna share some sweet wisdom with all of you who’ve ever wondered: “HOW THE HECK TO DO I DO RESEARCH?”

Now, I’m gonna start at the very beginning of the process and it’s probably not what you’re expecting to hear. This may be a bit shocking, and I’d advise elderly members of the audience to take a seat first, maybe check their blood pressure before I get to it.

We good?

Everyone’s sitting comfortably? Okay.

The absolute first step to any research project is…

WIKIPEDIA

No, really. I learned this in university, from a real professor and everything. We all learned years ago that you’re never supposed to cite Wikipedia, and this is completely true.

Nobody trusts it as a source. It would be like citing something you read off the side of a subway car. But what Wikipedia is good at is directing you to ACTUAL sources. Right at the bottom, in that sweet little references section, is a goldmine of all kinds of sources. And even better, the context of the article tells you what kind of information you can expect to find in those sources, and sometimes even what pages they’re on.

It’s fantastic. You can get books, websites, translated primary sources, anything and everything from the reference section. So as you go through the relevant Wikipedia pages, any information that catches your eye will have a nice little citation on it. So grab that sucker and add it to the list! And when I say pages (plural) I mean it! Pretty much everything has its own dedicated Wikipedia page, (except for us) but that single page isn’t gonna be enough to get the full picture. You want to find every page that relates to the subject matter; important places, related people or groups, relevant time periods, stuff like that.

Broadly, you want to get as much related stuff as you can since that’ll let you contextualize the subject; learning about it in isolation only gives you a fragment of the whole picture. Get greedy with it! you want to know everything about this subject, and that means you don’t need to skimp on the sources you pull together.

So, once you’ve combed through every tangentially related Wikipedia page on your chosen subject, noted down a list of promising sources and what you expect to find in them, that’s when you enter stage two:

HUNTING DOWN SOME SWEET SOURCES!

-From: How to do research, From Overly Sarcastic Productions.

18

No shoe-tossing here. This is exactly what Jimbo Wales has always said: encyclopedias, whether print or online, should not be cited as sources. They are consolidations and summaries of the particular topic, and can be used as a jumping-off point for research, based on the cites given.

I’m active on WP, and the two most important points on this are: “Wikipedia is not a reliable source”; and, “Everything must be backed up by cites to a reliable source or else it gets taken down.”

19

I was able to have my book-a-librarian appointment with the college librarian this morning via Zoom, and it was so helpful and quick. She showed me right where to go on the library’s website to get to three different databases she recommended and how to narrow down my search on them.