LEARN ABOUT YOUR TOPIC
When starting your research, you'll need to get the big picture on your topic. One good way to go about this is to consult a reference source like the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science or wikipedia. Use this stage as an opportunity to get deeply familiar with your topic: learn the specialized lingo, read about related topics, and identify key themes or issues.
USE KEYWORDS
When you search for books, articles, and more, it is a good idea to carefully select keywords to reduce your results to only sources that are relevant to your topic. Because you've already familiarized yourself with the key themes of your topic, you'll probably have a handful of keywords to use.
Use these tips to super-charge your search results:
- use AND in between search terms to group them together
(ex: "Time-line AND cartography" searches for results that contain both keywords) - use OR for more results
(ex: "Data Visualizations OR Information Graphics" shows results for both) - use NOT if you want to exempt a word from your results
(ex: "Data Visualization NOT EBSCO" returns results for all discovery layers except EBSCO) - use quotation marks "_" to isolate phrases
(ex: "Data Analysis" returns results that have the exact phrase in the record content while ignoring results with just the words 'data' or 'analysis' independently)
use the wildcard * to get all versions of a word - (ex: "data analy*" returns results for 'data analysis' as well as 'data analytics')
Use Specific Databases
Try these databases to narrow yourself to good sources of Data Analytics, Data Visualization, and Spatial Analysis & Design literature.
- ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Digital Library This link opens in a new windowA full-text collection of all ACM publications, including journals, conference proceedings, technical magazines, newsletters and books, and a bibliographic database dedicated to computing literature.
- Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA) This link opens in a new windowCovering 1960s-present, LISTA indexes books, research reports and proceedings, and over 700 journals covering subjects like librarianship, classification, bibliometrics, online information retrieval, and more.
- LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com) This link opens in a new windowAn online learning platform offering courses led by industry experts, teaching business, software (Adobe, Revit Architecture), technology, and creative skills. In order to set up an account, follow the instructions on the LinkedIn Learning LibGuide (https://libguides.pratt.edu/linkedinlearning).
- O'Reilly For Higher Education This link opens in a new windowO’Reilly for Higher Education (OHE) is a collection of full-text books and other resources specializing in computer programming and information technology. The database includes more than 35,000 book titles, plus 30,000+ hours of video, proven learning paths, case studies, expert playlists, audio books, and more.
- ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global This link opens in a new windowThe official digital dissertations archive for the Library of Congress and the world's most comprehensive collection of over a million full-text dissertations and theses from 1861 to the present day.
- Statista Expert This link opens in a new windowLeading provider of statistics for marketing and general research, consisting of over 1,500,000 statistics on over 80,000 topics from more than international 18,000 sources.
