New FAQs! …when it’s 3 am EST and the library is closed…

We’ve all had those weeks: work has been busy, family life has kept you running, homework has been put off…
now it’s the night before your homework is due and you can’t find your course reading!

It’s 3 am EST and the librarians are all fast asleep. What can you do? (Besides pour another cup of coffee…)

Check the FAQ’s! Since we can’t be there for you all the time, we’ve created a list of some of the most frequently asked questions and problems that students run into (especially late at night!).

Topics covered:
* What is my library log in?
* How do I find my required reading?
* What is peer review?
* What is a primary/secondary source?
* Why doesn’t Walden 360 give me the full text?
* How can I get this article that isn’t in full text in the databases?
* How do I find a qualitative/quantitative study?
* How do I download a citation and abstract?

Of course, during our regular hours feel free to call us with your questions!  Or send us an email and we’ll respond within 24 hours.   We’re happy to help!

National Guideline Clearinghouse

Health care professionals should know about and utilize this valuable resource! The National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC) is a public resource for evidence-based clinical practice guidelines. This resource synthesizes the research associated with clinical practice guidelines in all areas of health care and delivers them in a streamlined format online.

The National Guideline Clearinghouse is accessible online at http://www.guideline.gov/

Many of the guidelines are maintained in full text linked on the left margin of the summary page. If the full text is not available from NGC, the details for obtaining the full text will be posted.

The National Guideline Clearinghouse’s mission is to provide physicians, nurses, and other health professionals, health care providers, health plans, integrated delivery systems, purchasers and others an accessible mechanism for obtaining objective, detailed information on clinical practice guidelines and to further their dissemination, implementation and use.

Please take advantage of this valuable resource and make it a must search source as you advance in your health care career.

The Sage Databases: Tips for Use

Walden Library subscribes to many different databases owned by different companies.  Many students are familiar with the databases owned by a company named EBSCO.  Several other databases from different vendors look and act like the EBSCO owned databases, while others act quite differently.

I’ll highlight a few of the most frequent questions we hear when students are using the databases owned by Sage.  Those databases are:

Education: A SAGE Full-Text Collection
Health Sciences: A SAGE Full-Text Collection
Management & Organization Studies: A SAGE Full-Text Collection
Political Science: A SAGE Full-Text Collection
Psychology: A SAGE Full-Text Collection

Here are some “nitty-gritty” tips and facts about the features in Sage to keep in mind:

1.  ALL articles you find in the Sage databases are from peer-reviewed journals!  You cannot limit your results to “peer-reviewed” because they already ARE all peer-reviewed.

2.  When you do a search, make sure you have chosen the option to search only in “SAGE Content Available to Me”.  If you choose “All Sage Content” you will see results that are not actually available to you in full text right in the Walden databases.

Sometimes this is a good idea to open your search to “All Sage Content” when you want to be exhaustive in your search and you have time to go outside of the Walden databases to get the articles (by using a local library, Document Delivery Service, etc.).  But, if you search “All Sage Content”, you cannot easily tell which articles ARE in full text through Walden and which ones are not.

When you click on an article that Walden does not actually own in full text, Sage will ask you to login with a personal subscription (which you don’t have) or ask you to purchase the article (when we could help you try to get it for free instead).    So, please be aware that you don’t have to login to Sage (and can’t) and that you do have other options for obtaining non-full text articles in Sage other than purchasing those article directly from the database.

3.   You can “register” in Sage to save citations and searches (like a myEBSCOhost folder) without purchasing an individual subscription.

When in a Sage database, click on the tab that says “My Tools”.

In the green bar below the tabs, click on Saved Citations/Searches.

Now look at the last option on this screen:

Register for Access – Register online for access to My Favorite Journals and Content Alerts features.

Fill out the registration form to begin saving citations and searches!

Exploring a different-looking database can be trying when you are used the look and features of a more familiar database.  Always remember, your librarians are here to help you navigate and use ALL of the Walden resources to the fullest!

Questions?  You can always Ask a Librarian!

Education: A SAGE Full-Text Collection	1917 – current
Health Sciences: A SAGE Full-Text Collection	1879 – current
Management & Organization Studies: A SAGE Full-Text Collection	1947 – current
Political Science: A SAGE Full-Text Collection	1890 – current
Psychology: A SAGE Full-Text Collection

Question: Where’s the DSM-IV?

Answer: PsychiatryOnline!

PsychiatryOnline is a database on our Research Databases page (http://library.waldenu.edu/JournalArticles_ResearchDatabases.htm).

In addition to holding our electronic version of the DSM-IV, our subscription to PsychiatryOnline also contains some books and psychiatry journals, the American Psychiatric Association Practice Guidelines, and self-assessment tools in the areas of psychiatry, psychopharmacology, geriatric psychiatry, and substance abuse treatment.

The “homepage” for PsychiatryOnline (the first page you see when you go into this database) has a section on the right side for “Clinical Research News” and “Latest Journal Headlines”, providing an easy way to catch up on the latest research in psychology and psychiatry.

Got questions?  You know what to do:  Ask a Librarian!

Please don’t use the comments field to ask a question — this will delay your response considerably. Use the Ask A Librarian link at the top of the right hand column.

Webinar Archives Now Available

In May the library offered a series of live, online presentations on various library topics.  If you missed out on these presentations, you can view recordings of some of the sessions on our library web site. Just visit the How Do I…? page and look for the Webinar Archives.

Theorists through the Library!

Need to find a theorist? Not sure where to start? The Library can help!

Through the library, you have access to encyclopedias that contain information on theorists and theories. One of the best sources to start with is The Encyclopedia of Social Theory.

• Start at the library’s homepage: library.waldenu.edu
• In the center of the page under Books, click on eBooks.
• On the next page, click on e-reference from SAGE.
• You should then see a search box and a list of subjects. Scroll to the bottom of that list and click on Sociology.
• On the next page you’ll see a list of titles related to Sociology. Scroll to the bottom and click on Encyclopedia of Social Theory.
• On the next page, click on ‘Reader’s Guide.’
• You should then see a list of topics, among which are Theories and Theorists!!

Feel free to browse through these names to learn more about them and how they can relate to your research!

For questions about this or anything else in the library, please feel free to contact us through the ‘Ask a Librarian’ button on our web site!

Please don’t use the comments field to ask a question — this will delay your response considerably. Use the Ask  A Librarian link at the top of  the right hand column!

Search Tips for the Health Sciences

1. Identify the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) associated with your topic . You can do this inside the library”s MEDLINE or CINAHL databases by using their browse features or you can explore your topic in the National Library of Medicine MeSH Browser.

2. When you are searching the literature in MEDLINE and CINAHL, it is important to search for each topic separately and then combine them. You can expand your Search History to see the sets you have created in both MEDLINE and CINAHL. You will also locate the buttons near the Search History to combine the sets.

3. Select the Explode option if it is available when browsing and selecting a Subject Heading. Selecting this option will broaden your retrieval. This is especially true if you are combining and applying limits to fit the parameters of your research.

4. Consider using keywords combined with Subjects or in addition to a Subject search. You can truncate words to search variations, for instance: diagnos$.tw. in MEDLINE and diagnos* in CINAHL.

Please don’t use the comments field to ask a question — this will delay your response considerably. Use the Ask A Librarian link at the top of  the right hand column.

What’s in that database?: Mental Measurements Yearbook…

It’s a database!  It’s a print series!

It’s BOTH!

That’s right: Mental Measurements Yearbook is a database to which Walden Library subscribes.  But, long before we had computers, back when scholars only did old-fashioned book research, Mental Measurements Yearbook existed only as a print resource.

(To read more about the print resource and find out how long it has been around, see the publisher’s site here: http://www.unl.edu/buros/bimm/html/catalog.html)

The print collection of Mental Measurements Yearbook is comprised of hundreds (okay, I exaggerate… I think we’re up to eighteen…) of volumes.  In each volume, one would find abstracts and reviews of different tests, measurements, questionnaires, etc.   These are usually of the psychological kind, like a test to measure anxiety…or sometimes of an educational kind, like a test to measure reading-readiness.

And that is exactly what one finds in the database version of Mental Measurements Yearbook.   The print resource still exists, but the publishers also feed those same reviews of tests into an electronic format and make it “searchable” in a database of the same name!

So what do I mean when I say “reviews and abstracts”?  Well, that means that a researcher takes a specific test and reviews it to find out:  Is the test valid?  Was it properly researched and developed? Is it skewed in some way to a certain population group?

An abstract of a test would give one a general overview of what the test actually measures and what methodology it uses.

So who would use this database?  What is it good for?   Students in several subject disciplines may need to research a test or measurement.  Normally we think exclusively of psychology students, but also those of you in any social science field or in education might find it useful.

But how would a review of a test be beneficial?  Shouldn’t one want to get the actual test?  This is a good point.  A review of a test or measurement can be quite helpful.   These reviews tell one a lot about the test and its reliability and use.

Sometimes we here at the library speak with students who do wish to obtain the actual test or measurement they are researching or wish to use in their own dissertation research.   That gets pretty tricky.

See, the people who painstakingly created these tests and measurements are, quite rightly, protective of their work.  They only want qualified practitioners in their field (say, a licensed psychologist or a school counselor) administering their test to a patient or client.  Tests and measures usually need to be purchased from the licensed publisher of that test.  So most often a student needs to track down who that publisher is, or who the author of the test is, in order to obtain it.  Sometimes publishers or authors of a test have a special “student version”  (along with a “student price”!) of their test because they want to support fellow-scholars’ research, which is pretty nice of them.

And that’s where Mental Measurements Yearbook comes in:  by locating the review of the test, you also find out who the author is, and sometimes, who the publisher is!  Then we librarians can help you search for contact information.

Some tests and measurements are close to impossible to obtain.  Others are easily accessible.  It depends on the test.

Regardless, Mental Measurements Yearbook is the resource to use when you want to find information about a test.  You can not only search by the known title of a test, but you can search by keyword for tests and measurements too!  So if, for instance, you wanted to find a test measuring, say…library skills…you would type in the search box:

library skills

…and click the Search button.  Voila!

This has been a brief introduction to the database called Mental Measurements Yearbook.  Questions?  Ask a Librarian!

(Please don’t use the comments field to ask a question — this will delay your response considerably.

Use the Ask  A Librarian form to query the library.)

Closed for Memorial Day

The Walden Library  is closed for the Memorial Day holiday.

We will re-open on Tuesday, May 26.

As always, all database resources are available 24/7 from the Walden Library website.

DOI: Digital Object Identifier

The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) System is for identifying objects in the digital environment and maintaining links to items. The DOI will remain consistent across all platforms. The International DOI Foundation (IDF) is responsible for the development of the DOI framework and progress.  Located online here: http://www.doi.org/

This system of assigned numbers to items in the digital environment allows libraries (and other organizations that manage content) to provide persistent linking and retrieval between resources. 

You can locate a DOI on a citation inside the library databases by viewing the full citation. The DOI will be listed at the very bottom of the citation.  Not all databases will indicate the DOI so it may be necessary to utilize other tools to identify a DOI.

If you have a DOI and need to know the citation for that item, you can use The DOI System from IDF to enter and retrieve the bibliographic data you need.  

The DOI System resolver is available here: http://dx.doi.org/ 

If you know the citation of an article and need to look up the DOI, there is a great online tool to use.  This online form maintained by CrossRef allows you to retrieve Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for journal articles, books, and chapters by simply cutting and pasting the reference list. 

The DOI identifier is available here: http://www.crossref.org/SimpleTextQuery/

It is important to note that not all articles have DOIs.

The library staff can assist with locating DOIs on citations in specific databases. If you would like assistance from the library staff, please don’t use the comments field to ask a question — this will delay your response considerably. Use the Ask  A Librarian link at the top of  the right hand column.