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I am not sure if you have encountered this question at the Reference Desk yet -- Rebecca Harris (Politics) has assigned her POL 100 students to find a scholarly journal article on voting or elections.
Here is a brief research guide which outlines two simple ways to do the deed.
Professor: Uffelmann
Instruction Date: 2-12-2007, E hour
17 students
Erich is having his students do a paper where they have to review the literature, so he wanted me to show them how to use certain resources. The four I showed them were SciFinder, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science. I concentrated on the citation analysis functions of Scopus and WoS.
I put the course guide on the new wiki, at http://library.wlu.edu/wiki/index.php/Science/Chemistry254.
A student is researching the economics or cost-vs.-benefits relationship of afterschool programs.
EconLit was surprisingly ineffective -- almost nothing.
The fact that the NBER's collection of papers on the economics of education included only one item on after-school programs tends to reinforce the impression that there is not much economics-focused research on this topic.
ERIC was much more helpful. What was strange about this search, however, was that the Ebsco version of ERIC was very difficult to work with, almost as if the search interface had gone nutty. The free (U.S. Department of Education) version of ERIC was much easier to work with and more productive.
Two other productive resources -- the NCES and U.S. DOE sites.
Finally, an ongoing difficulty in conducting this research is the fact that there are at least three viable ways to spell the subject -- afterschool, after-school, or "after school."
I needed Dick's help with this one, and he reminded me that we have a section in the Web site's "Reference Shelf" dedicated to primary sources - U.S. History. In the Primary Sources list, the one most relevant to foreign policy during the cold war is - "Foreign Relations Of The United States." This is online through the State Department and available in print in Gov't Docs.
2/7 and 2/9
Spanish 207: Introducation to Spanish American Literature
Prof. Botta
27 students in total
Research Guide
Merrill
Projects: Presentations and papers
2/6/07
English 318: Medieval and Renaissance Drama
Research Guide
Pickett
12 students
Merrill
Thomas Hardy, Novelist and Poet Research Guide
English 299A
2/2/07
Prof. Keen
11 students
Guide prepared by Prof. Merrill, Humanities Librarian
Project: final research paper of 3500-4000 words
English 299B Research Guide: Satire in the African American Tradition
Professor Solomon
2/1/07
14 students
Merrill
Projects: 6 short response papers, and 1 long research paper
A student is interested in getting current information about the size and structure of the automobile industry worldwide. There are many sources that can be used to get at this information, but some sources that I recommend are Mintel Reports (this is a Williams School database and only available in Huntley Hall), Mergent Online – Industry reports, and standard databases like ABI Inform and Factiva. For the type of information the student needed, Mintel and Mergent will supply 95%.
Professor Eastwood.
Two class presentations (2 sections), with a total of 26 students.
Students will need "reliable, scholarly, secondary sources (and in select cases, primary sources) on the revolutions they've chosen" for their term papers. Example: Basque separatism.
Here is the research guide.