Author Archives: mdilwort

Author Archives: mdilwort

Law and Criminal Justice Questions

Law and Criminal Justice Questions

, Library Resources, Matt Dilworth, Research
For the last few weeks, we’ve been looking at how to get the most out of scholarly resources for each discipline taught at IU East, and this week we’ll look at criminal justice.  Many of these methods will build off of the general techniques we explored earlier, but some are unique to this field. Like medicine, law is another type of information that you don’t want to leave to the free web.  There’s a lot of misinformation and commercial material out there, and it can be hard to determine fact from advocacy.  Fortunately, there are plenty of good, reliable tools – and all of our criminal justice-related sources can be found here.  Databases like SocIndex or ProQuest Criminal Justice are … Continued
Education Questions

Education Questions

, Library Resources, Matt Dilworth, Research
These last few weeks, we’ve been exploring where and how to do deep, scholarly research in the various disciplines, and this week we will look at education.  Building off the general techniques we explored earlier, there are a lot of great sources for education research, and tools that meet the unique needs of teachers-to-be. For research articles, powerful tools like ERIC and ProQuest Education are the best sources to start with.  If you’re interested in teaching theory, Professional Development Collection is an excellent choice.  And depending on the grade level you’re interested in, there are even more databases designed for you – Primary Search for elementary grades, Middle Search for middle school grades, and MAS Ultra School Edition for high … Continued
Nursing Questions

Nursing Questions

, Library Resources, Matt Dilworth, Research
Recently, we looked at how to do basic research.  Those techniques will serve you well any time you’re searching for information, but if you’re doing nursing research, there are several great tools available to you at IU East that will help you with this very specialized topic. Medicine is one of the fields where reliance on scholarly, vetted resources is the most important.  While there are a few trustworthy medical websites on the free web, such as PubMed and the Mayo Clinic, in general medical advice on the free internet should be avoided at all costs.  The practice of medicine is too complex, and situations too linked to individual patient histories, to trust an anecdotal story someone put up on … Continued
Business Questions

Business Questions

, Library Resources, Matt Dilworth, Research
Last week, we looked at basic research.  But there are specialized tools for each academic discipline at IU East.  And while the basic searching techniques work in most databases, if you’re majoring in business and economics, you’ll want to use economics-oriented databases.  Fortunately, there are plenty of great sources for business news and research articles, like Business Source Premier or ABI/Inform (all of our business databases can be found here). So, using what we learned last week, if we had an economic question like “how is Obamacare expected to impact middle-income Americans?”  We would start with a database like Business Source Premier. We might use a search like: (obamacare OR affordable care act OR health care reform) AND (effect OR … Continued
Starting to Research

Starting to Research

, Matt Dilworth, Research
Whether you’ve been a student for a long time or are just getting started, knowing how to do good research can be a challenge.  You’re probably great at finding movie times with Google, browsing Wikipedia for quick information, and maybe you even do your shopping or banking online.  So you know that you’re good with a computer.  But what about the next step?  In your classes, you’re often told that you can only use ‘scholarly’ sources, and professors reject web pages.  How do you distinguish what the scholarly sources are, and where to find them?  And how do you use them? IU East subscribes to a lot of high quality sources that are ideal to use in your academic work.  … Continued