Research for Cinema Studies

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Research for Cinema Studies

• Anne Kaay
• Librarian
• Leddy Library
• akaay_at_uwindsor.ca
• 253-3000 x 3848

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Overview

• Leddy Library Home Page
• Finding Scholarly Journal Articles and Resources
• Search strategies
• Using Refworks to create your bibliography

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How to tell if a journal is scholarly?vs
magazines, trade publications, newspapers

• Longer articles, abstracts, bibliographies,
  peer-reviewed, etc.
• Some databases allow you to limit your search to
  scholarly or peer-reviewed journals
• Check the journals website and read their
  editorial information
• Look up the journal in Ulrichs International
  Periodical Directory (a database about journals)

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So I know what journal articles are but

• How do I find them?
• Look through them one by one
• Review bibliographies at the end of textbooks,
  encyclopedias or at the end of a great article
  that your professor gave you
• But the best way is to look them up in
  bibliographic databases (a.k.a. journal indexes)

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Databases

• Searchable collections of records describing
  individual journal articles
• A record contains information such as

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Where can I access the databases?
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Journals and the Library Catalogue

• Reminder
• The catalogue tells us which journals we
  subscribe to and the location on the shelves for
  the print journals as well as how to access the
  online version
• The catalogue ONLY gives us title level
  information. It does NOT tell us what articles
  are in the journal
• For this, we use the bibliographic databases
  (a.k.a. the Journal Articles and Databases)
• Our electronic databases also include
  dictionaries and encyclopedias these are
  accessible through the database listing and also
  through the library catalogue

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Developing an effective search strategy

• Identify major concepts for your research topic
  identify kinds of resources needed/acceptable
• For each concept, think of synonyms,
  related/alternative keywords, broader/narrower
  terms, variant spellings
• Combine and group your keywords using Boolean
  logic (AND, OR) and other strategies

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Developing an effective search strategy
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Developing an effective search strategy
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Developing an effective search strategy
Example
Technique
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Resources RefWorks

• Databases
• FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals
• Project Muse
• JSTOR
• Modern Language Association (MLA)
• Communications Mass Media Complete (CMMC)
• RefWorks