ENG 150 - Professor Pamela Hartman

This guide will help students gather sources for their "hot topics" presentation in Professor Pamela Hartman's ENG 150 course. It provides links and advice useful for finding articles from scholarly journals, trade publications, and general news outlets; TED Talks; movies and television shows; and blog posts by educators and professional associations. 

Use the links on the left side of the guide to find lists of resources divided into separate pages for different kinds of information. Many of the resources are part of the University Libraries electronic collections; if you are working at a computer off campus, you will likely be prompted to log in them with your Ball State username and password. Some resources in this guide are freely available on the Internet. 

It is often useful, before you being searching for information, to think of potential search terms.

You might begin by articulating your research topic as a question, such as: 

What are the advantages of teaching recent fiction to young adults as opposed to a literary canon? 

You can then identify the main ideas you see in the question and synonyms for them - those words will become your search terms. Alternate search terms do not need to be one-to-one interchangeable with your initial main ideas. They can be broader, narrower, or related terms. For example: 

• Recent fiction, recent books, popular fiction, new books, bestsellers, genre fiction 
• Young adults, students, adolescents, youth, teens, high school, middle school
• Literary canon, classics, classic books

Whether you articulate a research question or not, you will need to identify main ideas and, from those, primary and alternate search terms. Most library resources, and many information resources outside the library, do not perform well when a user types an entire question or sentence into a search box. Individual words and short phrases will work. 

Thinking of these words ahead of time will let you focus on your searches once you're working in a database, and prevent you from having to pause to think of additional terms. 

All other things being equal, the more search terms you use in a single search, the smaller your list of results will be. 

The University Libraries' article databases contain hundreds of thousands of articles, and many look for your search terms within the full text of the articles. You can therefore use two or three terms per search (and occasionally more). Other information resources might contain fewer sources or might not feature full-text searching, meaning you might only use one search term. 

Choose one term for each main idea you want to represent in your search. Finding the best terms can be a trial-and-error process, and might vary from one resource to the next. Try different combinations of search terms and pay attention how many results you receive and whether they generally seem relevant to your topic. If you need help, contact a librarian.