Summer Research Program (Gordon): Library Resources

Citing your sources is one of the most important steps in doing research.  RefWorks will allow you to store and organize your citations as well as easily create your bibliography/references (whether annotated or not) and final paper in the correct style.  

You can use RefWorks to:

• Organize references
• Format bibliographies
• Create a database of your own citations
• Import references directly from library databases
• Insert in-text citations, footnotes and bibliographies using the Write-n-Cite tool
• Share your citations with a group

Quotation Marks vs. AND vs.OR

Before building a search, think about how you want to combine your search terms.

• Putting words in quotation marks - if you want to search for a phrase rather than individual words, place the words in quotation marks. Example: "cell signaling"
• Using AND to combine search terms -  when you combine terms using AND, you will retrieve results in which both terms appear somewhere in the fields searched. Example: Cell AND Signaling
• Using OR to combine search terms - use OR to search for either word, which can broaden your results Example "cell attitude" OR "cell behavior"

A Nod to the Asterisk

• Using an asterisk (*) at the end of a word will bring back variations of the word.
• Example: cell* will retrieve results with the words cell, cellular, cellulose, etc.

When you have a citation in hand, it's tempting to go to the database with which you're most familiar and type in the title of the article. But since Fitchburg State provides access to over 100 databases, the article is very likely indexed somewhere else.

The fastest way to find out if we have the full text of an article is to use the library's Journal Locator tool.

Find the title of the journal in your citation and type it into Journal Locator. In this example the title is Foreign Affairs:

        Blight, J. G., Nye, J. S., & Welch, D. A. (1987). The Cuban missile crisis revisited.
               Foreign Affairs, 66(1), 170-188.

If we have access to the journal, Journal Locator will link you right to it. Then follow the rest of the citation - date, volume, issue, and pages - to find the specific article. (In the above example, it would be 1987, volume 66, issue 1, pages 170-188.)

Want to see what journals are available in a specific discipline? Go to Journal Locator, and instead of using the search box, use the drop-down menu under "Browse journals by subject."