Welcome Spring 1 2016

Welcome new students to my research blog and the class LBSU 302: Information Fluency and Academic Integrity. My name is John Macomber and I am your instructor this semester. I have taught this course for two years online and in hybrid format and every semester, with your help, I have been able to improve the courseroom. We have a very full classroom this semester and are at the maximum capacity of 35 students. Beyond Blackboard and the assignment PDFs, please use this site as a frame of reference or how to guide to complete your work. If anything seems unclear please notify me and we can discuss it as a class in many case it is very possible that others in the class may have the same question.

Blog replies
This blog is also a starting point to direct you to your peers blogs which will be necessary in upcoming assignments when you respond to your classmates posts. I recommend that each week that replies are required, you respond to someone you have not responded to before. This will ensure our class conversation circulates throughout our digital classroom.

Thank you and good luck in your future research

John Macomber

Week 8 - Literature Review

Week 8 - It's our last week!!!

For this last week, which is week 8, you will put all of your work together in a 2-3 page literature review. This work will analyze the sources you have selected to best represent your research question. Please do not just recycle your old papers. While it is ok to specifically select citations and their corresponding passages, I would prefer you select new material more closely aligned with your new research abilities. 
You are able to re-use up to four of your previous citations, but I would encourage new information and paragraphs not just reusing your all your old assignments.

Not a research paper. Focus on the main articles in your field and how they assist your work.  2-3 page literature review, double spaced.

Short for a reason focused on what has been done in the field, who is the top players are and what still needs to be done. (Badke, 2015).

What is the best work for the topic or issue?

The condensed style should help you to focus answer your question and prove to me as the instructor reader how the articles assisted to answer your final paper.

6 sources required three of which are journals. You can use up to four of your previous articles.

Cover page  - Running head: AMERICAS WAR ON TERROR      

 _________________________________________________                         

In the introduction you should:

a. define or identify the general topic, issue or area of concern

b. point out overall trends in what has already been published

c. establish your point of view for reviewing the literature [Include your research question!]

d. indicate the organization of the review

____________________________________________________

II. Body In the body you should:

A. group research studies and other relevant literature according to a common theme [for example, you may find prevailing theories and/or practices involved with your research; you can use these as thematic sections for the body of your literature review]

B. summarize each item of the literature appropriately according to its significance

C. compare and evaluate each item of the literature

D. provide topic sentences at the beginning of paragraphs and summary sentences at the end of sections to help the reader understand what the main issues are

__________________________________________________________
III. Conclusion

In the conclusion you should:

a. summarize the literature maintaining the focus presented in the introduction

b. evaluate the current "state of the art" [or state of the topic that represents your research question] [by] pointing out gaps in the literature, inconsistencies and issues that are important for future study

c. conclude by giving some insight into the relationship between your topic and a larger area of study or area of professional practice

Week 6 Open Access Journals

Week 6 - Open Access Journals

I want to make sure all of the class is on the same page for week 6. For this week you will NOT use Leatherby Libraries instead you will choose one of these open Access databases listed here and find an article. With the rain we only had half the class actually show up. This will be helpful for those of you who were not able to attend the lecture.

Since these databases are free for all their usability is somewhat lacking when compared with the EBSCO databases from Leatherby Libraries.

In Directory of Open Access Journals for example

It is sometimes hard to navigate through the wide range of full text scholarly journals from many different countries. Even with the language option chosen many different articles are from other countries and it is sometimes difficult to navigate the wide array of articles. 

Here is a listing of the top Open Access Journals that you can use for this week 6.

Important to note that some articles may be abstracts and not the full and complete text. A citation or article may lead outside the database to another source that requires purchase. Email me if you have problems navigating to find an article related to your topic.

Also you may have a broad range of articles at your disposal numbering in the thousands or very few that are not relevant to your topic. These databases are not as fluid as Leatherby Libraries and the databases like Academic Search Premier.

Make sure you choose a database closer to your topic. For week 6 both DOAJ -Directory of Open Access Journals & OAJSE - Open Access Search Engine, are your best bet to find articles across multiple subjects.

OPEN ACCESS RESOURCES 

Open Access: This definition means researchers/students have means free, open, unrestricted access, to peer-reviewed and scholarly journals.

Core
CORE (COnnecting REpositories) aims to facilitate free access to scholarly publications distributed across many systems. As of today, CORE gives you access to millions of scholarly articles aggregated from many Open Access repositories.


(DOAJ) - Directory of Open Access Journals 
Welcome to the Directory of Open Access Journals. This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals.

F1000Research
Open access journal in biology and medicine.

OAJSE
Open Access Journals Search Engine.



PubMed
PubMed is the publicly accessible version of MEDLINE developed by the National Library of Medicine. It contains citations from over 3,900 international biomedical journals. Journal coverage is provided from 1966 through the present. In most cases, an abstract is included with the citation.

Week 5 Empirical Research

Hello students hope you are all doing well,

Week 5 focuses on Empirical Research.

™Empirical - based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic (Oxford English Dictionary, 2015)
The Scientific Method has it basis on empirical research. Making calculations based on observation experience rather than just theory. Empirical research generates knowledge derived from observation or experimentation as opposed to theory™Typically, empirical research articles are written in a standardized format that outline the research study or experiment and include the following sections:•Abstract•Introduction and Literature Review•Methods•Results•Discussion or Conclusion
•References (or literature cited)

For Academic Search Premier I would recommend using Emperical research as a keyword and then in the following keyword box type your subject.

Other possible searches are "empirical evidence" or even "observation"

Using Empirical evidence as a keyword search you should see Empirical research as a keyword in bold for the articles you examine. For your assignment paragraph I would like to see in your paper what material did the authors link to empirical research? what did they observe or examine?

Possible research questions to think about for your assignment:

™What is the research study about?
What is the topic or focus?

™How is the research conducted? What is the research method used?
What did the authors conclude?

What were the findings/ results?

NOTE: You do not have to check the peer review box and you do not have to have the other keywords such as metadata or qualitative or quantitive in your article. It might pop up in your article but it is not required for the article to be used.

If you know for a fact that your article is an empirical research article you do not even have to include it as a keyword in your search. Try replacing emperical research with the word observation to see the search results.

Happy hunting!

Mr Mac

Week 4 Peer reviewed Journals

Week 4 Step by step to peer reviewed

Hello class, for week four we are examining peer-reviewed articles.
One of the class asked for a step by step so here we go! :)

Your best bet to finding these articles is either Academic Onefile or Academic Search Premier. Make sure you click the Scholarly Peer-Reviewed Journals box as well as a full text box.







Peer reviewed articles are examined and analyzed for content from those within their professional field. For instance a librarian writing a scholarly article may ask other professional librarians who have written on a particular topic of the field, how the material should be written.

(Peer review box for Academic Search Premier)

Most peer reviewed articles write in an acknowledgement for those that reviewed the work. In some cases this can be found at the beginning or end of an article. If this information cannot be found examine your work for their authors and how many are apart of your citation. Many of the peer reviewed articles have more than one author and all of the authors are listed in the citation. For the CRAAP Criteria in your paragraph you might say ___, and ___ and ___ worked together to make sure this study on ___ was accurate for the field.







A screenshot of Academic OneFile with peer reviewed box and full text box checked.

Let me know by email if you are having a hard time finding sources for your subject.

Mr. Mac

Hello & Welcome LBSU 302! Fall 1, 2015

“Information literacy forms the basis for lifelong learning. It is common to all disciplines, to all learning environments, and to all levels of education. It enables learners to master content and extend their investigations, become more self-directed, and assume greater control over their own learning.”
Information literacy competency standards for higher education,(ACRL, 2000)

Hello and Welcome to my research blog here on blogspot. My name is John Macomber and I am your new Instructor for the Hybrid course of LBSU 302: Information Fluency and Academic Integrity through Brandman University. There are 14 students in this class for Fall 1 and I am looking forward to getting to know each and every one of you through class and your individual research blogs. I have served as an Academic Librarian at Victor Valley Community College in Victorville, CA and currently serving as a Library Technician for Barstow Community College. I have previously worked as a librarian for both San Bernardino and Riverside Counties in Southern California. I have taught online and hybrid versions of LBSU 302 for two years for Brandman University.

As the class progress and you start your first posts I will start the process of linking your blogs to this page so you can see all of your classmates blogs and posts.

What is Information Competency? This course is similar in subject to an information competency course taught through many academic libraries. Usually these classes are a short course to introduce English 101 students to academic research, APA standards, and electronic resources.

LBSU 302 - Information Fluency and Academic Integrity - is an enhanced version of an information competency class: Understanding academic research through documents resources and academic databases, information use, citing sources and Library use taught in college and university settings.

Many of you will most likely have questions in the first week related to your research blogs and your first post. Make sure you are reading all the instructions and answering the questions to receive full credit. Feel free to email me regarding anything relating to the course.

Your textbook:
Research Strategies, 5th edition by William Badke

To save money I do recommend you purchase the required textbook for this course from iuniverse which has the ebook for $9 rather than the softcover for $20.

Good Luck!

“Mr Mac”

Mr. John Macomber

Week 7 Annotated Bibliographies

To make sure this week’s assignment is in the correct formatting, review the APA Annotated Bibliography sample provided by OWL Purdue. 
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/614/03/

You should have a total of 6 total sources for your Annotated Bibliography, 3 of the 6 need to be journals. You can use up to 4 sources from previous assignments. 

Why only 4 previous assignments? With all that you have learned throughout this class you may have found new articles that better reflect your new research abilities or new materials that are more closely related to your topic. You should expand on your previous weeks and find two new articles or books more closely related with the research question. 

REMINDER: NO RESEARCH NOTES THIS WEEK! Your research notes should be written into the second half of your paragraph or break into a second paragraph. The start of each paragraph should be an overview of the document and why it was selected and the second paragraph your CRAAP research notes

Also in the week 7 for Blackboard I have posted the Powerpoint that the Hybrid class uses during lecture. Their may be some notes that are valuable to you for this week to help you better understand the assignment.

Mr. Mac

The Myth that is Google Scholar

The Myth that is Google Scholar

My hope by now is that many have you have seen the folly / myth that is Google Scholar. As a class using a University database we are privileged to have such extensive, free to use databases at our disposal but the claim that a free to use database of full access articles is just around the corner can be tempting. What many of you have noticed when getting fed up with certain EBSCO search results and relying on the fail safe that is Google Scholar you find Pay Per View results. This is because many of the most relevant results are actually paying Google in some cases for priviledge of position in search results.

If you step outside the realm that is our university library and into the public use, you would be better off using Google Advanced search by .edu domain than trying Google Scholar.

The only issue in our case as many are looking for their field attached to careers is in some cases you may find some of these results are not articles but rather how to obtain your degree and the .edu sites become different universities trying to show you BA's as a social Worker or BA's in Psychology.

Yes with Google Scholar the term free to use sounds great we find many free abstracts but will find many results with Full Text with the low low price of 39.99 for the day L

Why do this when you have a University library databases free and at your disposal considering you did in fact pay for them being a Brandman Student?

Hopefully like Directory of Open Access Journals which was found this week you will find new actual scholarly journals and will venture outside of the bubble that is Google, Google Scholar and Wikipedia…

Mr Mac

Week 6 - Open Access Journals

I want to make sure all of the class is on the same page for week 6. For this week you will NOT use Leatherby Libraries instead you will choose one of these open Access databases listed here and find an article.

Since these databases are free for all their usability is somewhat lacking when compared with the EBSCO databases from Leatherby Libraries.

In Directory of Open Access Journals for example

It is sometimes hard to navigate through the wide range of full text scholarly journals from many different countries. Even with the language option chosen many different articles are from other countries and it is sometimes difficult to navigate the wide array of articles. 

Here is a listing of the top Open Access Journals that you can use for this week 6.

Important to note that some articles may be abstracts and not the full and complete text. A citation or article may lead outside the database to another source that requires purchase. Email me if you have problems navigating to find an article related to your topic.

Also you may have a broad range of articles at your disposal numbering in the thousands or very few that are not relevant to your topic. These databases are not as fluid as Leatherby Libraries and the databases like Academic Search Premier.

Make sure you choose a database closer to your topic. For week 6 both DOAJ -Directory of Open Access Journals & OAJSE - Open Access Search Engine, are your best bet to find articles across multiple subjects.

OPEN ACCESS RESOURCES 

Open Access: This definition means researchers/students have means free, open, unrestricted access, to peer-reviewed and scholarly journals.

Core
CORE (COnnecting REpositories) aims to facilitate free access to scholarly publications distributed across many systems. As of today, CORE gives you access to millions of scholarly articles aggregated from many Open Access repositories.



(DOAJ) - Directory of Open Access Journals 
Welcome to the Directory of Open Access Journals. This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals.

F1000Research
Open access journal in biology and medicine.

OAJSE
Open Access Journals Search Engine.



PubMed
PubMed is the publicly accessible version of MEDLINE developed by the National Library of Medicine. It contains citations from over 3,900 international biomedical journals. Journal coverage is provided from 1966 through the present. In most cases, an abstract is included with the citation.

Week 4 and this blogs past, present, and future

For all LBSU 302 students,

I'm writing to address some of the frustration from the weekly searches starts with finding a maze of different pathways through the Leatherby Libraries page. Not all roads lead to relevant results. Please make sure you use the general databases link at the bottom of the page..

selecting general databases at the bottom screen of Leatherby libraries Week 2,3, 4, 5

Finding ebooks in week 3 through the ebooks databases

Week4: After selecting general databases at the bottom of the screen your best bet for finding relevant results for Week 4 is Academic Onefile or Academic Search Premier

I am sending this to email as well as posting on the blog http://libgentech.blogspot.com as some of you were stranded it seems last week with the ebooks lesson. The standard fail safe is Google Books or Google Scholar (Google Books is many previews and Google Scholar is Pay per View results :(  )  after having issue with Leatherby Libraries this is where a few of you turned. While Google Books is interesting it will more often than not give you preview books with many pages missing. Our Leatherby Library databases are free to use with full text full ebooks, Google Scholar results are more often the top search are pay per view. I realized this weeks search results came about because I had not given enough insight into how to obtain a ebook in full text through Leatherby Libraries. When following the correct procedures all ebooks are full text and unlike Google Books are not skipping pages or just showing previews and unlike Google Scholar will never make you pay to view.

On your week 4 searches make sure you include full text and scholarly peer reviewed boxes checked before searching

This week we are examining Peer Review Journals. Like week 3 I only need one source citation so make sure you click the box for peer reviewed article that aligns with your research.

Just a reminder not to include the EBSCO links in your citations.

https://eds-a-ebscohost-com.libproxy.chapman.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=3&sid=4c8ae276-b204-49c8-9555-d13300920300%40sessionmgr4004&hid=4205&bdata=JkF1dGhUeXBlPWlwLHVpZCxjb29raWUsdXJsJnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=aph&AN=101184913

Dont use these long citations or list in your citation available from....It messes up your paper and just uses valuable space. Instead click on the citation link on the side of your article when you find which article you want. This should help you to create and get used to writing and seeing APA citations if you have not done so already in other courses....

How to CITE in APA format

Copy and paste your citation directly from the citation tool.

Links from this blog for all weeks

Google Advanced Search for Week 1

Week 2 - Add a new blog post through blogspot     

Find articles in Leatherby Libraries

Week 3  Finding Ebooks

Week 4 Peer Reviewed Journals

Week 5 Empirical Research

Week 6 Open Access Journals

Week 7 Annotated Bibliographies

Week 8 Literature Review