A&M-SA Research Guides: HIST 3334: Civil War and Reconstruction Research Guide: Research Help Tutorials

Welcome

Welcome! This page contains links to on-demand learning opportunities designed to improve your research skills! Learn how to search the databases in your subject area to find peer reviewed articles, tips on reading scholarly articles, writing help, and more!

Check out the Library FAQ guide to help walk you through some common library and research questions as well!

Academic Tools for to the Research Process Tutorials

Academic Tools for the Research Process
This guide includes a series of tutorials which provide a general overview of the Research Process, Avoiding Plagiarism, as well as the APA and MLA writing styles. Each is followed by a quiz.

Finding Peer Reviewed Articles

Finding Peer Reviewed Articles & Books

The library subscribes to several databases that provides access to millions of scholarly articles and thousands of books! These databases however can be a little tricky to use at times. Below are videos and handouts that provide tips and tricks on how to use a few of these databases to find scholarly articles and/or books. To search any of the databases listed below to find articles, click on the Finding Articles tab on this guide. To find books, click on the Finding Books tab to search the library's catalog.

Finding Scholarly Articles in America: History & Life (Video)
This video will cover search techniques and tools in the database America: History & Life. To access this resource, go to the Finding Articles tab on this research guide.

Finding Scholarly Articles in America History and Life (Handout)
This handout will go over how to find scholarly articles in America:History and Life as well as common database features. To access this resource, go to the Finding Articles tab on this research guide.

Finding Articles in Jstor (Video)
The video will cover search techniques and tools for the database JSTOR.

Finding Scholarly Articles- JSTOR (Handout)
This handout covers how to search the database JSTOR to find scholarly articles.

Searching the Library Catalog to Find Books (Video)
Watch the following video to learn how to use our library catalog to find books, place a hold and borrow books from other libraries.

Searching the Library Catalog to Find Books (Handout)
Learn how to conduct a basic search to find both print and e-books in our collection as well as libraries worldwide.

Searching America's Historical Newspapers (Handout)
Learn how to conduct a basic search for newspaper articles in the database America's Historical Newspapers.

Finding Additional Related Articles

Finding Similar Articles (Handout)
Besides searching by keywords to find additional articles, you can use a single article you have already found to locate additional resources relevant to your topic. Most library databases have integrated tools into their search platform to assist you with finding similar or relevant articles. This handout will go over several of these tools.
Find a Journal Article from a Citation (Handout)
In the cases where the database doesn't provide direct links to it's references, follow the steps in this handout to track down the full text to a reference citation.

Creating a Search Alert in EBSCOhost (Video)
Search Alerts save valuable research time, and can be set up to provide automatic e-mail notification whenever new search results become available.This video demonstrates how to create a search alert on the EBSCOhost interface.

Finding Major Journals (Handout)
This handout will cover how to track down the top journals in your field based on citation metrics such as Journal Impact factor, SJR, and H-index. Journal rankings can help authors with selecting where to publish.

Understanding Scholarly Sources

Scholarly articles. Academic articles. Peer reviewed articles. You may have heard these terms used by your professor, but what do they mean?

Peer reviewed articles are articles that have been evaluated by the writer's colleagues (or peers) in their field of study. The idea with peer review is that the reviewers uphold standards within the field in terms of research methodology, style, ethics, etc. Most academic databases will allow you to find peer reviewed articles by simply checking a box as you refine your search.

Watch the following video to learn more about the peer review process.

Peer Review in 3 Minutes (video)
Learn about the peer review process from NCSU Libraries.

Attempting to read a scholarly article for the first time may seem overwhelming and confusing. The resources below will breakdown the structure of a scholarly article and provide strategies on how to efficiently read one.

How to Read and Analyze an Academic Article (Handout)
A handout from Yukon College that provides guidance on how to read and analyze an academic article.

ACT UP (Infographic)
Evaluating your resources with a social justice lens
Evaluating Print Sources (Handout)
This handout from UNC- Chapel Hill will discuss strategies to evaluate secondary printed sources—books, journal articles, magazines, etc.—based on three criteria: objectivity, authority, and applicability to your particular assignment.
CRAAP Test: Evaluating a Source (Handout)
As you search for information you will come across a variety of sources. But how do you know if the source you found is a credible or a 'good' source? This handout from CSU-Chico provides a list of questions to assist you in evaluating the sources you found.
Source Evaluation:How Will You Use It? (Handout)
It’s important to question the quality and appropriateness of the information you cite. This handout covers how to evaluate your source based on purpose and use.
SIFT Method of Evaluating Sources
SIFT is a series of actions you can take to determine the validity and reliability of claims and sources on the web

Presenting Your Research: Writing Help

Note:The following resources are meant to provide a broad overview of the following types of research assignments. Please follow your professor's specific guidelines for their assignments.

Writing Help (Video)
This video from Credo will cover basic guidelines to follow in your writing. These include writing in a concise and clear manner, employing sentence variety and transitions, checking for spelling and grammatical errors, and becoming familiar with possible resources for writing help.
Constructing a Thesis Statement (Video)
Constructing a strong thesis statement is an integral part of writing a paper because it guides and structures the argument that you will make in your assignment. This video from Credo will walk you through the steps of creating a thesis statement.

Paraphrasing, Summarizing & Quoting (Interactive Tutorial))
Throughout your paper, you’ll use a mixture of techniques, including paraphrasing, quoting directly from your sources, and summarizing. Work through the tutorial from Credo to learn when it's appropriate to use each and how do you execute each of these techniques.
Synthesizing information for Academic Writing (InteractiveTutorial)
Complete this tutorial from Credo to learn how to combine what you've learned from reading various sources to form new conclusions about a particular topic.

Note:The following resources are meant to provide a broad overview of the following types of research assignments. Please follow your professor's specific guidelines for their assignments.

Anatomy of a Research Paper (Video)
This video from Credo covers the general structure of a research paper.
Annotated Bibliography (Tutorial)
This tutorial from Credo will cover the purpose and components of an annotated bibliography.
Literature Review (Handout)
A literature review synthesizes sources in a field of study into a summary that has a thesis or statement of purpose. They can be a section of a paper or can be the entire focus of an paper. To learn more about writing a literature review, view this handout from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.