IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS as you're using these library resources:
Welcome!
This guide is for students in Adam Bowen's PHIL 202 class.
Your animal ethics project requires you to find credible sources outside of your course readings to bring in and contribute to your research.
This guide is meant to provide you with suggestions for how you might approach doing that research.
To use your time wisely and most efficiently, use library databases as you do research. You can more comfortably rely on the authority and reliability of items you find through library databases. Plus -- don't worry -- you can do everything online!
While you can totally do this by starting on the Libraries' homepage and visiting the Databases page, I'm adding direct links to the databases here to streamline things a bit.
IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS as you're using these library resources:
To search like a pro, use the CHOP, DROP, and OR technique. This works in most every library database.
CHOP your topic into the different concepts involved.
DROP each concept into a separate search box on an Advanced Search screen. (I'll have to add extra search boxes to do this search.)
Then think of whether there are different spellings, synonyms, or related words for each concept and type them in (if there are), using OR between them. Here are the synonyms/related terms I thought of:
Here's how those terms might be put into an Advanced Search form in OneSearch.
All of the documents that show up in the results list from this search will include:
This allows you to cast your net wide so your results include writings from authors who use slightly different ways to describe your topic.
Then, of course, you want to evaluate what you find.
Because OneSearch is multi-disciplinary, covering the sciences, social sciences, humanities, etc., searching in OneSearch allows you to search for sources touching on your topic from a wide variety of perspectives. This can be great -- and sometimes overwhelming. Also note that OneSearch allows you to search for both scholarly and more popular treatment of your topic.
Because Philosopher's Index has a much narrower focus than OneSearch, it is significantly smaller. But you can trust that everything you find from searching in it has some relation to philosophy or ethics, and the vast majority of the articles are scholarly in nature. And it can be nicer to have a smaller pool of records to go through.
Since Academic Search Premier is multi-disciplinary, covering the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, it can be useful when looking for a philosophical stance taken from outside the realm of philosophers.
Tips for searching in OneSearch:
Tips for searching in Philosopher's Index:
To explore the topic of pets, in general, I could search on pets and its synonym "companion animals," as shown here:
This record might interest me, and give me the idea of narrowing my search to discussion of the value of pets:
My search, then, could look like this, so that the results are focusing on any terms with "value" in them:
Once you've chosen an article based on its record in the database you're searching, bring up the full text by either clicking on the PDF or HTML full text link, or by clicking on . (More information about Find It @ BALL STATE.)
Tips for searching in Academic Search Premier:
Here's a sample search:
For the topic of the ethics of having exotic animals as pets:
Leads me to this record, where I see the phrases "wild animal trade" and "wild animals as pets" in the subject field.
This gives me the idea of searching using those two phrases. I'll use the quotations marks around each to keep the words together. And put OR in between them, so I find articles with either phrase.
Once you've chosen an article based on its record in the database you're searching, bring up the full text by either clicking on the PDF or HTML full text link, or by clicking on . (More information about Find It @ BALL STATE.)
When you're using a database, and can't find a link to the full text of an article, look for a Find It @ Ball State button.
Find It helps you to search the Libraries' other databases and subscriptions to see if the full text is available through another resource.
To use Find It, click on the red Find It @ Ball State button.
If we DO have full text access to the article, a page will be displayed with options for access under "Full Text Format Options." The typical options are:
If we do NOT have immediate full text access to the article, the OneSearch record for the article will be displayed.