Welcome to a new edition of This Week in Reference! We hope your winter quarter is off to a good start. The days are shorter this time of year, but our research help hours are long! You can get immediate research help online via Ask a Librarian until 10pm most days.
We are getting hundreds of questions as research papers and projects ramp up, and the topics are as interesting as ever. Here are a few of the topics we’ve helped research recently.
- Video game design for users with disabilities
- Social media addiction in adolescents
- Heart failure research published within the past five years
- Canada’s role in the First World War
- Future of hands-free technology
- School-to-prison pipeline in the United States
- Biographical information about the Russian theatre director Yevgeny Vakhtangov
- European fashion trends from the 1860s
- Discriminatory regulations for intersex professional athletes
- Social media and political polarization in the United States
- Effect of high property taxes on low-income neighborhoods
- Music and mental health
- History of domestic violence in the United States
Here’s an in-depth look at a recent Ask a Librarian conversation:
Student: Hi, I am having trouble narrowing my topic for a paper in my health science class. I want to write about dry needling, but I need to narrow it down while also finding enough information for and against my topic. Could you help me brainstorm or point me to a resource that could help me narrow?
Librarian: hello! I’ll begin with a link to the health sciences research guide. This guide lists a variety of databases that will be useful for you to search https://libguides.depaul.edu/healthsciences
Student: I have been looking through the CINAHL Complete resource tab
Librarian: sure, one moment and I’ll run a quick search
Student: Thank you
Librarian: are you required to locate scholarly articles?
Student: Yes
Librarian: Thanks. I’ll send through a link of a basic search and then we can talk about narrowing your topic
Student: okay
Librarian: so this is a search of CINAHL and a few other health databases through EBSCO the vendor https://bit.ly/3nbdVmL
Librarian: I only used “dry needling” as a search term and also narrowed to articles published in scholarly journals in the last 10 years. do you have thoughts about how you would like to narrow your dry needling topic?
Student: I thought about narrowing it down to its use for shoulder injuries or knee injuries. I cannot tell if there is enough information both ways to make it a solid paper, or if i should narrow it more
Librarian: sure, one sec and I’ll refine your topic
Librarian: I entered this in the second box: shoulder or knee and the results narrowed to 154
Student: Okay I did the same
Librarian: and then I entered this in the third box: outcomes or effectiveness. and now there are 105
Student: I did not think of doing that, thank you
Librarian: I think that is a good list of results to begin browsing through and selecting articles
Student: Okay I will start here, thank you for your help!
Librarian: you are welcome, good luck!