ProQuest Research Companion was built to help users do more effective scholarly research and to support educators as they teach the core information literacy principles of finding, evaluating, and using information.
This resource has nine Learning Modules that address different steps in the research and information seeking process. It also features several interactive tools to help researchers during the research process, including a Source Evaluation Aid that allows users to enter the name or URL of a book, periodical, or website to determine key information (including whether it counts as a peer-reviewed source); a Citation Builder tool; and a Search Aid that provides suggestions for alternative search terms.
There are a lot of tools out there that are designed to help you find and organize your research! Here are a few research tools that you might find particularly useful during your research process.
The Relay Library has a number of other resource guides designed to help you in your research and practice! Feel free to browse these guides for subject-specific journals, online resources, and more.
For additional resources on using the Relay library, including certification materials, copyright and fair use, finding books and articles, highlighted resources, using the Relay proxy, using Google Scholar, and more, check out our Intro to the Relay Library guide (linked below)!
Maybe you've found an article cited in a literature review that's exactly what you've been looking for; or you found an article on Google Scholar that the Relay library doesn't have access to; or you need a chapter of a book that the Relay library doesn't have an ebook copy of. Not to worry! Email us at library@relay.edu or fill out this form - we can help you to track down a copy of the article or chapter that you're looking for, or we can submit a request for the article through Interlibrary Loan.
Zotero is a citation management tool that allows you to build a personal library of information from articles, books, documents, web pages, and more! You can use Zotero with any word processing tool to help format your research paper. With Zotero, you can:
Zotero can be a really helpful tool for students and researchers! Although it's described as a "citation management software," it does more than help you format citations and bibliographies (although that's a super useful tool, too!). Zotero automatically imports tags and keywords from any books or articles, which not only makes your personal library much more searchable, but also automatically provides keywords that you can use in future searches. You can organize your articles into folders or create your own tags (perhaps you want to group articles from particular classes in one place, or maybe you want to create a separate folder for your Master's defense).
tl;dr: Zotero will save you a lot of time and help you to keep more organized while doing research and other coursework!
You can download Zotero (or Zotero Connector, the browser extension) here.
For guides tutorials, and other information on how to use Zotero, check out some of the links below:
There's a lot of citation management software out there! We typically recommend Zotero because it offers the most for a free account, and it's fairly intuitive - however if Zotero just isn't your thing, there are a number of other well-known citation management tools, including:
There are a few reasons you might turn to Google Scholar over the library search!
Google Scholar is a really useful search tool - however, it's important to take these resources with a grain of salt! There are a few things to keep in mind when searching on Google Scholar:
You can set up Google Scholar to link to articles that the Relay library provides access to! Learn more about how to set this up here.
If you find an article on Google Scholar that you can't access through the Relay library, email us at library@relay.edu! We can request the article for you via Interlibrary Loan. Please include as much information as possible in your request (including article title, author, journal title, volume/issue, and/or a link or DOI).
Google Scholar offers a lot of search and filtering options, including an Advanced Search that allows you to search for words or phrases in the title or the full text; search for articles by a particular author or published in a particular journal; or filter by a particular date range. It also allows you to "Favorite" articles and save them to your personal article library. However, there are two particular features that we'd like to highlight that you might find most useful when using Google Scholar: the "Cited by" feature and the Author Profile page.
Google Scholar indicates how often an article has been cited in other articles. This can be helpful if you're looking for seminal works or other articles that are well-known and well-read within the field. Articles that have been cited more often are typically credible and reliable sources (although it's always important to critically analze and consider the articles that you are reading!).
If you click "Cited by", you can view all of the articles that have cited this particular article. This can be useful if you're searching for similar articles, or if you want to find more recent articles on a similar topic. You can also search within citing articles - this can be helpful if an article is frequently cited (such as the example above) and you want to filter or narrow down the results.
Authors sometimes have profiles that list information about them (such as where they work or teach and what their research specialty is) as well as a list of articles that they have authored or co-authored. You can click on the author's name to access their profile page.
Author profiles also frequently include keywords associated with the author's work - you can use these keywords to help find articles on similar topics.
