In our previous blog we explored how looking for information in the right place can help save you time and effort. However, sometimes, the right place to look can depend on what type of information you’re looking for.
While you’re probably familiar with books and you may have been introduced to journal articles, these are just two of the types of academic information available to you. Depending on your research question or essay title you might also find it useful to explore, for example, conference proceedings, maps, company information or newspapers.
Each type of information has its particular use; books provide an in-depth overview of a topic; journal articles are more specialised and focus in-depth on a particular area of a topic, and newspapers give you a useful perspective on events. While Library Search can help you find a large range of information types, some types of information are only available in special databases or archives. Before you start your search, it’s therefore important that you decide what types of information you will need to complete your assignment most effectively. You can find out more about different information types on our Finding Information Guide and in the video below:
When you know which types of information you need for your assignment or project take a look at our Resource Guides, which provide useful links and guides to appropriate sources.
When you’re looking for information to help you write your
essays, assignments or projects it can be tempting to turn to the source of
information you use every day – Google.
While Google can be useful in some ways (such as finding company
websites or journal author’s profiles), it wasn’t exclusively designed to help
you find good quality, academic information that is reliable and relevant. This means you’ll likely have to spend more
of your time wading through huge amounts of information and fact-checking
resources for accuracy.
Thankfully, Google isn’t your only option – there are a number of different places to look that have been created with the aim of providing you with the information that you need, such as your reading lists, Library Search, and key Subject Databases.
Take a look at this video to find out more about how these
sources can help you:
For more help on finding information, take a look at the Academic Skills Kit.
It provides unique access to the working notebooks, verse manuscripts and correspondence of William Wordsworth and his fellow writers, including Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and Robert Southey. While also offering a fascinating insight into the wider social, political and natural environment that shaped much of Wordsworth’s work, through the addition of travel journals, legal and financial records, guidebooks and over 2500 pieces of fine art from the Wordsworth Trust. There’s even more to explore with secondary research materials, including essays, biographies, maps, and photographs of the Lake District.
You can choose to browse the database via the Documents and Visual Resources tabs on the menu or use basic / advanced searches to focus your results.
Documents
The Documents section allows you to browse materials by collection (e.g. Dove Cottage manuscripts, Maps, Wordsworth Library Letters) or by document type (e.g. prose manuscript, correspondence, diary) and sort items by date, document type or first line.
You can also run a Document Advanced Search, which allows you to look for keywords within collections, document types or in works by a particular author.
Item records contain clear, full colour, digital scans of the document, which you can view in detail online or download as a PDF. You’ll also find bibliographic details and notes with options to export the record to EndNote or RefWorks.
Visual Resources
Under Visual Resources you can browse the Art Gallery, Art Wall, Photograph Gallery, and Effects and Objects.
The Art Gallery showcases paintings, sketches and prints featuring portraits of Wordsworth and his family, alongside landscapes of the Lake District and other inspirational locations. The Art Wall provides an in-depth look at a small selection of these artworks with a short essay on their history and context.
The Photograph Gallery provides modern images of the Lake District specially commissioned for the database, while Effects and Objects offers photographs of the rooms and garden of Dove Cottage, and some of Wordsworth’s personal possessions.
You can also run a Visual Resources Advanced Search to focus your exploration.
Images are subject to copyright but may be used for educational purposes. Take a look at the FAQs in the help section for more details.
More to Explore
Beyond Documents and Visual Resources, you’ll also find a collection of historical maps alongside an interactive map of the Lake District that allows you to explore key areas in the region. Literary Lives provides brief biographies of the important literary figures of the English Romantic period and in Further Resources you’ll find a timeline of the period as well as a small selection of essays on the theme.
My Archive
You can choose to register for a free My Archive account within the database, which enables you to save searches and build your own library of documents and images. A useful way to keep track of your research and the resources you’ve found.
If you’d like to know more, the Page by Page guide in the Help tab provides detailed guidance on using advanced search features, viewing your search results, using images in teaching and research, and building your collection in My Archive.
With the high volume of information available to you online when you begin your research, it can be difficult to know which of the sources you find to actually use in your assignments or essays. Ultimately, you’ll want to choose the information that is of good quality and that can help you to answer your research questions most effectively. This means you need to make some critical decisions about the information you have found. Even if the materials you find are from reliable sources, such as Library Search or a Subject Database like Scopus you’ll need to consider how the information you’ve found compares to other information and if it is suitable for your purposes.
To help you make effective critical decisions you’ll need to think about these key areas:
Currency – is the information up-to-date?
Relevance – does it help you answer your research question?
Authority – who wrote it? How qualified are the authors?
Accuracy – how did the authors of the information reach their conclusions? What evidence and data have they used?
Purpose – Why was it written?
The video below looks at these in more detail:
See the Academic Skills Kit for more advice on selecting suitable information for your assignments and for more on the ins and outs of critical thinking take a look at this great blog from the Writing Development Centre: Shopping Around for a Critical Opinion
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA) indexes and provides abstracts of journal articles, books, book chapters and dissertations on linguistics and language sciences including topics such as:
Anthropological linguistics
Applied linguistics
Descriptive linguistics
Discourse analysis
Language – pathological and normal
Learning disabilities
Nonverbal communication
Phonetics
Phonology
Psycholinguistics
It’s an excellent resource for those interested in the nature and use of language.
The database provides both basic and advanced search options and you can limit your results by information (source) type, publication date, subject, language and more. You can also limit to peer reviewed items only. While some full text items are available, LLBA item records generally provide only bibliographic information and an abstract, so look out for the ‘Find@Newcastle’ button in your results page, which will help you check for a full text copy of an item in Library Search.
LLBA has the advantage of including a specialised linguistics thesaurus, which you can use in advanced search to refine and focus your search. The thesaurus provides a searchable list of all the subject terms used in the database and highlights links between broader, narrower and related terms, helping you to select all of the keywords relevant to your topic.
ProQuest provide a helpful and detailed guide to LLBA which includes search tips for basic and advanced search as well as some sample searches you can work through to familiarise yourself with the database.
Referencing is an important part of academic writing –
you’ll usually find it included in the marking criteria for your assignments
and projects, with marks being awarded for correctly formatted citations and
reference lists.
Why is referencing important?
It acknowledges the ideas and contributions of
others that you have drawn upon in your work, ensuring that you avoid
plagiarism
It highlights the range of reading you’ve done
for your assignment and makes your own contribution clear, showing how you’ve
taken ideas from others and built upon them
It enables the person reading your work to
follow up on your references so they can learn more about the ideas you’ve
discussed in your work or check any facts and figures.
How does referencing work?
Are there any tools that can help?
Yes! There are lots of referencing tools that can help you manage and format your citations and references correctly. Here are some examples:
A very useful online tool that lists all the information you need to include in a reference and provides examples of how a reference will look as an in-text citation and in a reference list. See our ‘Level Up Your Referencing: Cite Them Right’ blog for more information.
Citation Buttons
Keep an eye out for this symbol on Library
Search and Google Scholar. Clicking the
button will provide the option for you to copy a reference in a particular
style and paste it directly into your reference list. You might need to tidy it up a little bit but
it will save you time over writing them manually.
Reference building tools help you
to create a bibliography using the correct referencing style. You can input information manually or use
import functions to pull information through from other webpages or documents. As with the citation button above, reference
building tools can save you time but you may still need to check the references
are accurate.
Reference Management Software: e.g. EndNote
If you’re writing a detailed essay, dissertation or thesis, you may like to use a reference management tool such as EndNote, Mendeley or Zotero to help keep all of your references organised. This software allows you to manually add references or import them from Library Search, Google Scholar or Subject Databases; sort references into groups; attach pdf documents or add notes. You can then use the reference management software while you write to add in-text citations and format your reference list.
The University has a subscription for EndNote which is available in all University clusters and can be downloaded to your own personal device. You’ll find information about how to get started with EndNote on our EndNote Guide.
Remember: whatever tool you use, it’s always a good idea to get to know the conventions of the referencing style your school or lecturer would like you to use so that you can spot mistakes or missing information.
You can find out more about referencing and plagiarism by following this tutorial from Cite Them Right (You’ll need to log in to the institutional log in with your University username and password.)
The Perdita Manuscripts is an excellent resource for those interested in Early Modern history, Women’s Studies, and the History of the Book. It provides access to digital copies of little known manuscripts written by women, together with helpful notes and essays by experts in the field.
The database holds over 230 digitised manuscripts created and compiled by women in the British Isles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These previously ‘lost’ (perdita) female authors produced a diverse range of content such as account books, calligraphic writing, culinary writing, diaries, medical writing, prayers, prose, translations, travel writing, verse and more. The collection also includes writing in English, French, Greek, Italian, Latin and Spanish.
Document detail pages include a scan of the original document, which you can enlarge to read or download as a pdf, alongside bibliographic details of the manuscript. Links below provide further details, sometimes including physical descriptions of the manuscript, additional information on the repository holding the item, notes and searchable keywords.
Some manuscripts also include section details for each page of the scanned document, which have details such as genre of a section, first and last lines and folio information.
Where you have accessed the document via a search query, you’ll also find a Search Results tab, which provides an overview of where your search terms can be found in the document.
The manuscripts can be explored and accessed in three ways:
Browse Documents Section
Under the Browse Documents tab, you can browse the manuscripts by alphabetical listing, genre, repository, date, language or by particular primary authors (Perdita Women).
Search Directories
The Search Directories, available under the Research Tools tab, allow for browsing using subject terms lists (metadata). You can select from a list of Perdita Women (primary authors of manuscripts), Names in general (key names included in the database, excluding the Perdita Women), Places, and Genre.
In the Research Tools tab you’ll also find an index of the first lines of both poetry and prose texts.
Search Tool
The search tool located in the top right, provides options for a basic keyword search and an advanced search. While BOOLEAN operators, phrase searching, and wildcards can be applied in both search options, advanced search allows for a more complex query to be constructed by searching particular fields (e.g. title), limiting by date, and selecting specific terms from lists of Perdita women, languages, genres or sources.
The Help section provides further useful advice and guidance on searching the database and using the digitised images in your study, research or teaching.
Library Search is a powerful tool that can help you find good quality, relevant information quickly. Using Library Search is pretty intuitive but there are some useful search tips that can help you improve and get the most out of your searches:
Keywords and Subject Terms
When you’re searching for information it’s important to use a range of related keywords to ensure you find everything relevant to your topic. For example, if you’re searching for information on ‘Climate Change’ you might also want to search for ‘Greenhouse Effect’ or ‘Global Warming’ too. Thinking of related keywords can sometimes be difficult but Library Search can help!
From your search results page, click on the title of a resource to open the resource record and scroll down to the ‘Details’ section. Here you will find a list of ‘Subjects’, also known as subject terms, used to describe the topics and themes this particular resource discusses. Take a look at this list and add any relevant words to your search string.
There are some other useful features in the resource record page that can help with your searches too:
Browse the virtual shelf
At the very bottom of the record you’ll find a virtual bookshelf, a visual list of the books that can be found next to this one if you were looking in the physical library. As the library is organised by subject some of these titles might be useful for your research too.
Read the abstract
A quick way to tell if a resource is going to be relevant and useful for your research is to read the abstract, a summary of the contents of the resource. On the resource record in Library Search, you’ll find this under the heading ‘Description’.
Advanced Search
The Advanced Search function in Library search allows you to create a search that will produce more focused results. It does this by providing a range of search fields and drop down lists that help you build up your search.
Select from the options to:
Limit your search field to the title, author, subject, collection etc.
Apply BOOLEAN operators (AND, OR, NOT) to your keywords
Filter by specific material types, languages and dates to focus your search results to the most relevant resources.
Take a look at the Advanced Searching page on our Finding Information Guide for more on how to combine your keywords, create a search string and improve your search results.
Today celebrates the 190th anniversary of the founding of the Natural History Society of Northumbria, (NHSN) a local voluntary organisation that encourages and supports research in Natural History via lectures, field outings, education courses and publication of scientific papers. The Society also established the brilliant Great North Museum: Hancock, which continues to house its fascinating Library and Archive collections, both important resources for the study of natural history in the North East of England.
The Library, also established in 1829, holds a wealth of material on natural history, with coverage including flora and fauna, ornithology, geology, ecology, the history of natural history and biodiversity. Here you’ll find the latest field guides for birds, plants, mammals and insects from around the world alongside regional, national and international journals and books about ecology, zoology, botany, ornithology, entomology, geology and conservation. The Library is open to everyone, but membership is required for borrowing books.
Meanwhile the Archive holds thousands of artworks, photographs, letters, diaries, and notebooks covering all aspects of natural history, zoology, botany and geology. It also includes internationally important material, notably the original watercolours, pencil drawings and proof engravings by Thomas Bewick, the Northumbria-born naturalist and wood engraver. Archive material is available to view by appointment only.
For a taste of what the collections have to offer, you can visit the Society’s newest exhibition: ‘The Beauty of Plant Science’, on display in the NHSN Library. Curated by postgraduates at Newcastle University, the exhibition presents colourful botanical illustrations alongside myths and poems to show how Science and Art coexist:
Looking for authoritative and comprehensive information on the oil and gas exploration and production (E&P) industry? Then have a browse of OnePetro! A unique library of technical documents and peer reviewed articles, it includes full text documents of many key conference proceedings in the field and provides access to a number of subject relevant journals.
For a quick introduction to OnePetro, including how to search the database and how to use advanced features, take a look at our helpful video guide (4:49 min):
Today celebrates the 190th anniversary of the founding of the