AEA 2014 conference presentation on supercharging your search. Topics cover include: tips for searching using Google, alternate search engines, finding full-text journal articles, finding free high quality images, free or low-cost research databases. using citation managers

1. SUPERCHARGE YOUR
SEARCH 2014
Matthew Von Hendy MA/MLS
Green Heron Information Services

2. WELCOME!
 Owner—Green Heron
Information Services
 Professional Librarian
—National Academies
of Science, EPA,
NASA
 Birder, cyclist, runner
—recent Alaskan
adventurer

3. SESSION GOALS
 Discuss Google and other search engines
 Talk about searching tips and tools
 Cover places to go to find free full text for journal
articles and images
 Look at high quality/low cost research databases
 Peek at citation reference managers
 Questions and answers

4. SEARCH ENGINES

5. GOOGLE RULES!
 Google is the resource that professional
evaluators use to find research resources most
often
 A few words of caution:
 Google ‘filters’ results based on previous searches
 Try searching in an alternate search engine to
double check your google results

6. ALTERNATE SEARCH ENGINES
 DuckDuckGo https://duckduckgo.com/
 Blekko http://blekko.com/
 Ixquick https://ixquick.com/
 Baidu http://www.baidu.com
 Try searching your name on Google vs. these 3

7. HOT SEARCHING TIP #1
 When searching Google…
 Use the site filter to limit to a particular website
or type of domain ( site:http://www.epa.gov) or
site:edu
 Use the filetype filter to limit your results to
PDFs (filetype:PDFs)
 More google searching tips can be found at:
http://
www.google.com/insidesearch/tipstricks/all.html

8. SEARCHING TOOLS
 Use ‘Advanced Search’ tools if available
 Boolean Operators – AND, OR, NOT
 Truncation symbol – ‘*’ finds anything that
starts with the root of a word
 Phrase searching – quotation marks “ “
 Date limiters—allow you to specific dates of
search

9. FREE FULL TEXT ARTICLES
 Google Scholar scholar.google.com
Subset of Google that focus on ‘academic’ literature
 Mendeley
http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/
Crowd-sourcing site—many researchers have
downloaded their work here
 Directory of Open Access Journals
http://doaj.org/
Somewhat of a ‘work in progress’ but does allow
searching for articles

10. HOT SEARCH TIP #2
 Tip:
For Google Scholar:
Use the Advanced Search by clicking on the
downward facing carat on the right side of the
search box

11. FREE IMAGES
 Keep in mind copyright and attribution
 Pixabay http://pixabay.com/en/
 morgueFile http://www.morguefile.com/

13. RESEARCH DATABASES
 Excellent sources of high quality information—
 Almost every field has a good/low-cost free
research database
 Articles/information is often abstracted and
indexed aiding searching

14. SOME EXAMPLES
 (Health Sciences) PubMed
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed
 (Education) ERIC http://eric.ed.gov/
 (Transportation) TRID http://trid.trb.org/
 For Science and Technology Resources see
my article..
http://www.infotoday.com/OnlineSearcher/Articles/Features/

15. HOT SEARCH TIP #3
 Some publishers offer discounted rates for one-time
access to their research resources
 American Psychological Association (APA) offers
a $11.95 24 hour pass to their 3 major databases
including PsycINFO—
 http://www.apa.org/pubs/databases/access/direct.aspx

16. DO YOUR CITATIONS LOOK LIKE
THIS?

17. CITATION MANAGERS CAN
HELP…
 Organize your citations
 Citation information can be downloaded directly
from most search tools into many citation
managers
 Allow for PDFs of articles to be attached to
articles
 Can be shared between people if they are using
the same program
 Automatically creates in-text citations and
reference lists in a specified citation format (APA
5th, MLA)

18. FREE CITATION MANAGERS
 Endnote Web http://www.myendnoteweb.com/
(There is a full version of Endnote which requires a
subscription).
 Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/
 Zotero https://www.zotero.org/

19. TRACKING FEDERAL AND STATE
LEGISLATION
 Congress.gov New website developed by
Library of Congress to track federal
legislation http://beta.congress.gov/
 National Conference of State Legislature
List of State Billing Tracking Sites http://
www.ncsl.org/research/telecommunications-and-information- Bill Track 50 – Search federal and state bills
http://www.billtrack50.com/

21. GOVERNMENT REPORTS
 Great sources for topical overviews, recent
resources and up to date statistics
 Government Accountability Office
http://www.gao.gov/
 Congressional Research Service Open Access
https://opencrs.com/

22. HOT SEARCH TIP #4
 When searching databases use these 5 action
words to find evaluation related articles on a
particular topic
 Assess, analyze, evaluate, measure, impact
 (“youth violence”) and (assess* or analyz* or
evalu* or measure* or impact*)

23. GREY LITERATURE
 What is it?
 Essentially everything that is not a journal
article or a book
 Most evaluation-related works are grey literature
resources
 They are usually hard to find because they are
typically not included in the major databases
(Google will pick up some but not all of them)

24. GREY LITERATURE RESOURCES
 New York Academy of Medicine Grey Lit
Report-- http://www.greylit.org/
Health sciences, health policy including evaluation
 Popline -- http://www.popline.org/
Reproductive health and family planning
 Defense Technical Information Center --
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/
DOD sponsored publicly available research

26. QUESTIONS?

27. IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS LATER…
 Always happy to chat about research
questions and research resources
 Monthly newsletter on research resources
and tips for evaulators – if you are
interested in getting it – email me:
info@greenheroninfo.com

28. CONNECT WITH ME
 Matthew Von Hendy
Green Heron Information Services
(240) 401-7433
info@greenheroninfo.com
www.greenheroninfo.com
LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/vonhendy
Twitter @GreenHeronInfo

29. THANK YOU!