Communication Studies 301 - Introduction to Public Speaking (Hicks)

OneSearch and Library Databases

  Web Search Engines

Types of Information Retrieved

• Scholarly journal articles
• Magazine / Newspaper articles
• Conference papers, Ph.D. dissertations
• Books and Ebooks

• Everything published on the open and indexed web
•  Commercial sites (.com or .net); educational sites (.edu); governmental sites  (.gov); organizations’ sites (.org)
• Few free scholarly journal articles and books

 When to Use

• Best for college level research
• Best for academic research
• When you need to find credible information quickly
• When you are writing a research paper

• Best for non-academic and general searches
• A good place to start when you are doing research: get a main idea of your topic, and related terms
• Information needs to be evaluated

Authorship

• Scholars / Researches / Professionals

• Anyone

 Reliability/Creditability

• Content is evaluated for accuracy and credibility by subject experts, researchers and publishers
• Content is reviewed and recommended by faculty and librarians

• No review/editorial process with regard to content.  
• Must evaluate each source by yourself

Accessibility

• Full text articles free to LRCCD students, faculty, and staff
• Library databases subscriptions are paid by the library

• Information is often free, but some sites do charge

Usability

• More control over your results: user can specify advanced search criteria; full text, date, scholarly, format, etc.
• Databases usually include a citation tool to automatically create a citation for the article

• Millions of search results: not organized 
• Lack of subject focus results in irrelevant
• No citation tool available.