GESTIÓN DE LA FORMACIÓN OCUPACIONAL EN LA PROVINCIA DE SORIA

Search Subtopics, Not Topics

General topics will always return more citations than you could possibly want. Before starting your search, identify a number of subtopics related to your research interest.

Limit Subtopics by Discipline and Dates

If a subtopic search yields far too many articles, limit your search to that subtopic, but modify your search by looking at articles only from international relations journals. You can also try limiting your subtopic search to a ten-year period and reducing the number of years depending on how many articles are found.

Search by Library of Congress Headings

Libraries have reference books listing the Library of Congress subject headings. Searching under a subject heading related to your topic is crucial to finding useful information.

How to Search the Literature 23

Use Boolean Operators

Boolean operators are simply words used to modify your topic to make your online search more specific to your needs. Most search engines use some Boolean operators but not necessarily all of them. Here is a list of the major operators.

䊏AND: When used between search terms, this operator tells the computer that

both terms must apply to the articles returned by the search.

䊏OR: This operator usually increases the number of articles you get in a search

because it tells the computer you would be happy with articles discussing either one of the topic keywords that the OR sits between. It can be helpful if a topic is sometimes discussed under different titles, such as “global warming” or “climate change.”

䊏NOT: This helps you narrow a search to a subtopic when one group of articles

dominates another. For example, most articles you will find on campaign finance are associated with campaign finance reform. If you want articles on campaign finance but not on reform, indicate this with an operator: “campaign finance NOT reform.”

䊏*: Not all search engines allow the asterisk operator, but if your search engine

does, it can be very handy. The asterisk operator tells the computer to search for articles with any derivative of the word that contains the asterisk. For example, using the search word “enviro*,” you would find articles containing the words environ, environment, environmental, environmentalist, environmentally. As another example, you can locate the following terms in articles by using the search term “wom*”: woman, women, woman’s, women’s, womanly.

䊏NEAR: This operator is especially helpful for narrowing your search when your

topic includes commonly used words such as “climate change.” You could search using “climate AND change,” but that would not necessarily get you articles on global climate change. Rather, you would get articles on climate with a reference somewhere in the article to the word “change,” but they could be totally unrelated to climate change. By using “climate NEAR change” you will get articles where these words are probably used in the same sentence. This is far more likely to give you the type of articles you want.

One other way to search for scholarly literature on your topic is by going through gateways, which are basically electronic portholes into the resources available through many of the nation’s largest research institutions. Here’s a list of some gateways that provide resources useful to international relations research.

䊏 http://wsrv.clas.virginia.edu/~rjb3v/rjb.html

Foreign Affairs Online lists a broad range of sources for the study of in- ternational relations.

24 C H A P T E R 2 Scholarly Literature and the Literature Review

䊏 http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/INOR/deibert-guide/TOC.html

Ronald J. Deibert’s site, Virtual Resources: International Relations Research Resources on the Web, contains subject links including human rights, international political economy, nongovernmental organizations and activists, and international security, among others.

䊏 http://guides.lib.umich.edu/content.php?pid=17084&sid=115547

This University of Michigan site contains a list to IR sites.

䊏 http://guides.lib.umich.edu/content.php?pid=26817

This is the University of Michigan’s site on international organizations.

䊏 http://www.policyarchive.org/

Policy Archive is a digital library that contains public policy research conducted by scholars and think-tanks.

Although you may have difficulty accessing the full text of the articles you find online, many of these articles will be available in hard copy through your college or university library, and if you begin your broad literature review early in your project development, you can obtain just about any article you find. Many libraries also have interlibrary loan (ILL) services that for little or no fee will send you copies of journal articles not available at your institution. This type of service, however, often takes a couple of weeks. To take advan- tage of ILL services, you must start your literature review long before your paper’s due date.

Literature review searches are nonlinear. There is no specific path for find- ing sources related to your topic. One reason is that many scholarly journals have overlapping themes. For example, ethnic conflict could just as easily fall within the publishing guidelines of a journal covering international law as it could be found in a journal on international organizations. Therefore, we can- not give you specific roadmaps that can easily take you to all the articles you will need for your literature review. But we can give you some tips.

The best advice for conducting your research on the scholarly literature review is to rely on the work of others as your guide. For the literature review, begin by conducting a search using standard search techniques, with the ini- tial goal of finding a journal article that is very closely related to your broad topic—through JSTOR, for example. If you find an article that is closely re- lated, you can employ techniques that will help you find additional resources through what we call backward mapping and forward mapping.

䊏 Backward mapping: Most journal articles are heavily weighted with

references to other authors’ works. This practice of giving credit to all related studies and carefully documenting the sources of information can be used to help you find the information you need. To backward map, find one good journal article closely related to your study. This article will have its own literature review and a bibliography of sources. Use the bibliography from this article as your search guide. Follow up on all

How to Search the Literature 25

sources that appear related to your dependent variable. The articles you find using this article can then be used for additional backward mapping to find more articles.

䊏 Forward mapping: You can get a good idea of a given article’s

importance to the field of international relations by using the Social

Sciences Citation Index. This resource will provide you with a list of schol-

arly sources that cite a particular article. This is important in determining the current value of a study or theory that may be fairly old. If scholars continue to cite a work many years or even decades after its initial publi- cation, it is likely to be a seminal article with valuable information that you should include in your literature review. Forward mapping will also help you find additional sources by identifying other studies related to the same article. The Social Sciences Citation Index is available either in hard copy or online. If you have questions about how to use the Social Sciences

Citation Index, you should ask the reference librarian.

While you can access a good number of journals online in full-text form, in some cases an abstract will be available but not the entire article. Citing an abstract is insufficient. You will need to obtain a full copy of the article if you include it in your research paper and should cite information found in the ar- ticle itself, not just the abstract. Do not limit your literature review to only ar-

ticles that can be accessed online. There is also great utility in viewing the

entire journal in which you find a valuable article. Many journals have entire issues focused on a single topic, which may lead you to related articles that did not show up in your original search. You may find interesting journal articles by going to the current periodicals section of your library and looking at the hard copy versions of recently published journals. (Again, refer to the list pre- sented earlier in this chapter for titles of some IR publications.)