Читать книгу The Research Experience - Ann Sloan Devlin - Страница 53

A useful starting strategy is to look at your library’s holdings through its electronic catalogue. You will need to use some search terms or keywords you have thought of or identified (e.g., by looking at the relevant thesaurus in your discipline, such as the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms [11th ed., revised] for psychology). As an example, a recent search looking up the keyword “personal space” for materials (books and media) limited to my institution, yielded 1,099 entries covering a wide range of topics, from art to medicine, which are in some way related to the topic of personal space. Expanding the search to include online sources of materials available on that topic, the number of listings for personal space jumps to 1,876,667! What this example dramatically shows is that the vast majority of resources available to researchers are accessible online. Nevertheless, it is useful to understand what is available through other avenues.

Keywords: Search terms for information retrieval.