How to Do Library Research

Session #1: Exploring Your Discourse Community

Discuss with a partner:Photo of people talking around a table

  • What's the last conversation you had?
  • With whom?
  • About what?
  • In what medium? (text, Facetime, in person, Twitch...?)

 

 

Photo credit: Jessica Da Rosa on Unsplash

  1. Using Google (or apps or other search tools of your choice), find some organizations that members of your discourse community belong to. (For instance, Google librarian association.)
  2. Read the "About" page and make sure this is a significant organization that members of your discourse community belong to.
  3. Now look through the organization's website for mentions of conferences, publications, or other conversation mediums they sponsor. 

What formats does your discourse community use to communicate?

  • Conferences
  • Trade journals
  • Scholarly journals
  • Social media (Twitter hashtags, Facebook groups, LinkedIn, Slack channels?)
  • Membership organizations
  • Books
  • Message boards
  • Blogs
  • ?

 

Now that you have some artifacts of your discourse community, take notes on the following worksheet in Google Forms. What can you tell about your discourse community from its journals, conferences, blogs, etc.?

Discovering Your Discourse Community: Google Form

Note: your Google Form submission will be sent to your email, as well as to Gina the librarian and to Prof. Sweeney. Make sure to hit Submit by the end of class! You can continue adding to it after you submit it.

Session #2: Scholarly Research by and about your Discourse Community

Before you search for articles that answer your specific research question, observe how your discourse community writes and what they write about by reading what they read. Your discourse community may write and read journals. Search for journals available through the SMC Library below.

Use Browzine (search box below) or the Journals Finder to find journals, magazines, and other publications written for your discourse community that the SMC Library subscribes to. You may need to play around with different terms for your discourse community.

Search e-journals

 

Want to see publications other than scholarly journals? Try the Journals Finder.

Pro tip #1: use * to find different variants on a word. For example, account* finds Practical Accountant, Journal of Accounting, and Journal of Accountancy. Medic* finds Molecular Medicine, Medical Humanities, and Journal of the American Medical Association

Pro tip #2: If your discourse community has a ton of journals and you don't know which one to choose, find out which ones are cited the most using SciMago.

Pro tip #3: If you want to see if a journal employs peer review (also known as being refereed), look up the journal title in Ulrich's Directory of Periodicals. If you see a striped referee shirt, that means it uses peer review.

Now try finding what others have said about how your discourse community communicates. Articles about your discourse community may be published in journals for your discourse community, or they might be published in journals about writing or communications.

Try doing a search like this in one or more of the databases below:

your discourse community AND ("discourse community" OR discourse OR communicat*) and feel free to tack on keywords related to any particular research question you have

Sample search in Multisearch for librarianship AND (discourse OR communication) AND whiteness

Databases:

 

For example, these are the kinds of articles/chapters you might look for:

"Performing the Poet, Reading (to) the Audience: Some Thoughts on Live Poetry as Literary Communication" in the Journal of Literary Theory

"A Balancing Act: Developing a Discourse Community in a Mathematics Classroom" in the Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education

"Negotiating Meaning in a Hospital Discourse Community" published in a book titled Writing in the Workplace

Session #3: Are Your Sources Credible and Relevant?

As you look through the research you've gathered, consider:

  • What do these sources tell me about how my discourse community writes?
  • What can these sources do for my essay? (see pp. 50-51 in The Curious Researcher)
    • Background: what makes this question worth asking?
    • Exhibits: displays of how my discourse community writes
    • Arguments: what other people have said about how my discourse community writes
    • Method: how have other people analyzed their discourse community, and can I borrow their methods?
  • Are my sources credible for the context of my essay? (see pp. 52-55) 
    • Who wrote them?
    • What’s the argument, and what evidence do they use?
    • When was it written? Is that recent enough?
    • Where was it published? What does that tell me about the audience? (You can look up whether the journal is "refereed," or peer-reviewed, in Ulrich’s Directory of Periodicals.)
    • Why was it written?
  • What else do I need? And how do I find it?
  • Reflection: How can you use these skills, and the knowledge you've developed, outside of this assignment? Outside of this class?

 

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