ACAP Learning Resources: COUN2041 Alcohol and Other Drugs: Assessment 1

Welcome

This guide has been designed to help you get started with your library research for assignments in the unit Alcohol and Other Drugs. The library has great resources available to help you answer the questions in these assessment tasks.

Learn more about finding ebooks and journal articles, referencing and other research skills from libguides.navitas.com/learn.

What is Research Literature?

Some edited books, journal articles, theses and government publications will employ research paradigms and methodologies to support a hypothesis. Methodologies can be broadly categorised as longitudinal, qualitative or quantitative. Many of these publications are peer-reviewed, meaning they have been checked by a panel of experts before publication. Most library databases offer a peer-reviewed checkbox which will filter search results in this way. They will also allow you to filter results according to research methodology, focus group, geographical location and much more.

If you'd like a little more information about what constitutes a research paper, take a look at the Understand & Evaluate Research Articles video and download the Structure of Research Papers file below.

Structure of Research Papers

Where to Search

For this assessment, the library recommends Ebsco Databases including PsycINFO. To include PsycINFO in your selection go to Ebsco via A-Z Databases. Here, you must scroll down and tick the PsycINFO checkbox before continuing to search.

Whenever possible, source literature for your papers from multiple sources. If you are writing a paper with a limited word count and a fast-approaching due date, it may be okay to limit your search strategy to a few of the major library databases. However, more in-depth papers should draw from a wide variety of sources, ensuring that a thorough search of the literature has been conducted.

The Choosing Resources page on the Information Skills guide will provide you with more information about where to access information sources. You can also follow these links:

Developing a Search Strategy

Employ a systematic approach to your search by formulating a number of advanced searches and deploying each from multiple sources. One strategy is to copy and paste the same search into numerous sources, which have been opened in multiple tabs across the top of your internet browser. Take a look at the Advanced Searching tabs below, and for an even more in-depth look, follow the relevant links at the bottom of this page.

Note that the first search you run probably won't be the final one. You will have several iterations along the way to finding a set of final tested search strings. As you pick up new key terms and phrases by reading through the material you find, often a new set of criteria will emerge with which to search the literature. Also, do not forget to employ citation chaining strategies once you have found relevant sources.

Advanced Searching in Ebsco Databases

Remember to include PsycINFO in your selection. Go to Ebsco via A-Z Databases, scroll down and tick the PsycINFO checkbox before continuing to search.

The search boxes allow you to construct a more focused search and adjust it more easily.

Use one box for each of the main topic areas you are looking for. In the example below, the search topics include:

The Drug: alcohol OR drinking OR ethanol OR binge
The Population: teenagers OR adolescents OR youth OR young OR college OR student
The Context: influences OR social OR environment OR parental OR peers OR friends OR family

Use three boxes, one for each topic and include synonyms for each topic in that box. If you want to include more topics in your search, most databases will allow you to add boxes.

Between each search box you are able to choose the appropriate Boolean operator to connect your search terms.

In the search below, the AND operator is selected in the drop-down menus and OR operators are typed in the search boxes between synonyms. You can also refine your search string at this stage by adding wildcards, truncation and phrases. For example, here we have truncated words such as alcohol and drinking, adolescent and teenager.

You are able to use the ‘Select a field’ drop down menus to tell the database where to look for search terms.

You might have to adjust these fields if you’ve limited the search too much. You might also try mixing and matching across the search boxes as some fields will work better with different keywords. Below is a brief definition of some of the common fields you can choose from:

Select a Field or Any Field - Will look through all sections of item records for your keywords. This will deliver a larger, more comprehensive set of results.
All Text - Will look through the entire full-text of the items. This will deliver the largest set of results but they may not always be the most relevant.
Author - Use when you want to search for a particular author or theorist. Begin by just using the author's surname.
Title - Will just search through the titles of the items in the database. This will give you a much smaller and relevant set of results.
Subject terms - Will look through the subject tags attached to each record. Again, this will give you a smaller more relevant list of results.
Abstract - When looking for journal articles, limiting to an abstract search will often give you a relevant, yet comprehensive search. The abstract is the summary you find at the beginning of a research article.

After you hit the search button and retrieve your results list, you will also see a Refine Results menu, usually down the left or right hand side of the page. This menu allows you to use the built in facets of the database to easily refine the results and deliver a more relevant list. A few ways of limiting the search include:

Full-text: Ticking the full-text option filters your search to resources subscribed to by the library and so, you will have immediate access. However, you can choose to expand the number of results by unticking this option. Note, you may then need to look for non-subscription items elsewhere or request via the interlibrary loan service.
Peer Review: If you are unsure about assessing scholarly material, you can limit the results to just peer reviewed studies.
Date: You may also just want to look at recent research and publications. To do this, limit by date from the Publication Date field.
Facets: And you can make use of the limiting facets produced by the database. These are based on the metadata from your results list. Subject or Thesaurus terms are often a good place to start in order to make your results a little more relevant but there is often a variety of other options to choose from such as methodology, gender, age, geography, publication type and so on.