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Information Literacy Tutorial

Our Library's tutorial covers: research skills, critical thinking and information literacy.

Finding Additional Sources


If you have already found a relevant article or book for your assignment, it is possible to use that article to find additional related information.  There are a few different ways to do that:

  • Use the citations that are referenced within the article to find similar articles by looking up the references

  • Look up other works by the same author or other authors cited in the article

  • Doing a keyword search with the title of the article to see if it has been cited by other articles which may contain relevant information

Relevant Results


Once you find one good article, you can use it to find more useful information. There are several different ways to do this.  Below is an image of a typical PDF article from a database journal.

Looking for other works by the author is a good way to find related content. Usually authors write multiple articles on a similar topic. Similarly, abstracts contain many key words which maybe useful to you.  They are located in different areas in documents but usually near the top.  By skimming the abstract and looking for key terms, you can do another search on the same subject with those terms.

Mining Citations


The works cited list of any document that contains one is a great place to find or "mine" for additional information. Below is a part of the works cited for a document.  You can copy and paste the title of the article into the title field of the advanced search options to see access options. You can then repeat the process with the new source. 

 

Sometimes, within a document there are references or footnotes.  These are usually represented by numbers near what they are referencing.

 

When you see one of these numbers near a point you would like to investigate further, look to the bottom of the page, and you will see a source or a further explanation of where the information originated. 
https://library.ncc.edu/c.php?g=596954&p=4195364
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