3. Locate Research Materials - ELC1012/ELC1013 - English for University Studies - Guides & Tutorials at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

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Faculty Librarians

Faculty Librarians are designated librarians for your faculty, who can offer specialized help on your course assignment and research project. Make an appointment with your Faculty Librarian for in-depth assistance!

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	Contact your Faculty Librarians on in-depth research questions

Scholarly Sources

Now you have developed some understanding of your topic and have formulated your research question. It's time to find more scholarly materials to develop and support your arguments in the essay.

Scholarly sources help you develop an academic argument for your research. Scholarly journals and books are two major scholarly sources you will need for your research work.

You have probably heard from your instructor that you would need to read peer-reviewed journal articles. So what are peer-reviewed journal articles and where to find them?

Find Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

What are Journal Articles?

What are Peer-reviewed Journals?

Present the findings of a study, research or experiment
Provides in-depth analysis of ONE specialized topic
Written by scholars or experts in the discipline

Peer-reviewed or refereed journals have an editorial board of subject experts who review and evaluate submitted articles before accepting them for publication.
A journal may be a scholarly journal but not a peer-reviewed journal.
Scholarly journals use this process to protect and maintain the quality of the material they publish. See an example from a journal publisher: WILEY's Peer Review Process

This is what a typical journal article looks like. The key components are highlighted.

Where to Find Journal Articles?

Library subscribes to a huge number of scholarly journals in different disciplines. You can use OneSearch, the Library's search engine, to find the articles in these journals based on the topic you have.

Watch this video to learn how this works.

Find Books

The quickest way to find books is through a direct search in OneSearch. You may search by Keywords, Title of the Book, Call Number, or ISBN number. Follow the steps below:

Visit the Library homepage, click on the embedded search box, or directly visit OneSearch.
Type in your keywords or title of the book and hit the search button.
Limit results to "Books" under Resource Type on the right panel of the page. You may further refine results to "Physical items" (which means print books only), or "Full Text Online" (which means e-books only).
Click on the book title to see more information about the book.
For print books, the location is described by its Call Number. You will need to find the book from the bookshelf and check it out at the Service Counter at P/F (see below for How to Read Call Numbers).
For e-books, sign in with your NetID and NetPassword to get access to the full-text of the book.

Click to see the steps in screenshots

Steps to Build a Search Statement

Steps to Build a Search Statement more efficiently

From the video tutorial you have learnt how to search peer-reviewed articles using OneSearch - the Basic Search, where all keywords are typed in one line. Sometimes you may not be able to get satisfactory search results when your topic involves multiple concepts. This is when Advanced Search can help.

Advanced Search allows you to build a more structured search statement. This helps you find relevant results more efficiently.

Advanced Search
	All Fields Title Subject Journal Title ...	Enter a search term
OR NOT	All Fields Title Subject Journal Title ...	Enter a search term
OR NOT	All Fields Title Subject Journal Title ...	Enter a search term
✚ Add a New Line			Search

This is how Advanced Search looks like in OneSearch and many article databases. With the multiple lines structure, you can type in keywords representing different concepts in separate lines and specify the search field for each line.

You can also apply searching techniques, e.g. combine your search terms with Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to make your search more precise.

Here are the 4 steps to build an effective search statement.

1. Identify keywords

From the preliminary search, you may have identified a few keywords and related terms from your research question. Pick 2-4 core keywords that represent different concepts. The keywords are usually nouns or noun phrases. Watch this video to learn a few more tips about picking keywords.

Example topic: "The impact of COVID on the hotel industry in Hong Kong".

The keywords picked could be: COVID, hotel industry, Hong Kong

2. Add keywords & combine them with "AND"

Go to OneSearch Advanced Search or an article database (e.g. Web of Science, Scopus) to build your search statement.

Use AND to combine the keywords so that the search results will include all these keywords.

To make your search more precise, you may:

Use quotation marks " " to enclose the phrase to search the terms as a phrase. This is known as a phrase search.
Specify search field, e.g. search within article title, subject, journal title.

In our case:

Advanced Search
	All Fields	COVID
AND	Subject	"hotel industry"
AND	All Fields	Hong Kong
✚ Add a New Line			Search

If you run this search in OneSearch, you will notice there are very few results. This shows that the keywords you used may not be the keywords used in research papers. To make sure we do not miss out those studies, we need to expand our search by adding alternative keywords.

3. Add synonyms/alternative terms & combine them with "OR"

Use OR to combine the alternative keywords (or synonyms) so that articles containing at least one of the keywords will be included in the results.

You may also:

Use truncations * to include variants of a word, e.g. travel* searches travel, travels, traveling, etc.
Use parentheses ( ) to enclose the phrase to specify the order (terms within parentheses will be executed first).

In our case:

Advanced Search
	All Fields	COVID OR coronavirus OR pandemic
AND	Subject	"hotel industry" OR hospitality OR tourism OR travel*
AND	Title	Hong Kong
✚ Add a New Line			Search

Check search results in OneSearch and see the difference. Note that we changed the search field of "Hong Kong" to "Title" so that only articles with "Hong Kong" in their title will be retrieved. This again makes our search more specific.

4. Refine search results by applying filters

The last step is to refine your search results using filters, e.g.

Peer-reviewed journals only
Publication year range
Subject category
and more

You can find similar filter options in OneSearch and many other article databases.

Don't target for a perfect search statement on your first try! It is very common to refine your search statement until you retrieve a manageable number of relevant results. You may discover new keywords or even refine your research topic during the searching process.

Read More Search Tips to learn more about Boolean Operators, Truncations, and Phrase search.