Recreation Therapy 380: Home

#1 Important tip:  Search tools work most effectively when you use keywords or key phrases instead of typing in the entire research question or sentences.  If your search terms include prepositions (to, with, of, about, for etc.) or articles (a, an, the), you'll want to re-word it.

ALSO!

1. Be flexible with your keywords. Try synonyms or related terms. The term you are thinking of may not be the one in current use by researchers in the literature.
2. Put phrases in quotation marks.  Use quotes for things that are actual recognized phrases such as "adaptive equipment" or "North Carolina" and not "results of testing" or single words such as "kayaks"
3. Use and/or/not (boolean searching) to combine words/phrases. 
   • AND - combines two or more words and makes your search NARROWER
   • OR - tell tells the tool "this term OR that term" and makes your search BROADER
   • NOT - tells the tool to ignore any results with that term, even if that result has the keyword/phrase you want.  This will make your search NARROWER
4. Use the advanced search in databases or other search tools to combine ideas more easily.

There are two main types of articles you'll come across in these databases and here's how to recognize the difference between the two:

Scholarly research article (sometimes called a primary source, a research article, or an empirical research article)

This reports on original research, meaning the researchers conducted their own research, gathered and analyzed data, and reported on the findings.  These articles are recognizable as they are generally organized into IMRAD:

Introduction (which includes a literature review)

Methods

Results

Analysis

Discussion

Scholarly review articles

This articles are generally reporting on what is known about a specific topic and is a survey of the primary research literature.  The authors of these articles are not reporting on their own data or results but rather summarizing others work to develop a broad perspective on the topic. Does not adhere to the IMRAD format.

Q1.  How easy was this source to use on a scale of 1-10 and why?

Q2.  How useful did you find this resource for your topic?  Did it meet your needs?

Q3.  What was this resource lacking for your topic?

Q4.  What was the most useful aspect of this research tool for you?