The literature review – how it contributes to planning your literature search/search strategy How searching works – how records are retrieved with different search techniques Generating search terms (keywords) - ways to identify relevant search terms Where to start…Library Search (and how it compares to Google Scholar) Some search examples – how to create a search string Useful features of Library Search – value added features to help with evaluating search results and finding related literature (research hacks to find papers) Locating previous dissertations

Matching discovery tools to information needs - identifying the best tools for your specific question. How to find research handbooks, research monographs and textbooks Finding journal articles Types of journal article Multidisciplinary databases Subject-specific databases on the Proquest and EBSCO platforms Key databases for social research Types of content in sociology and social sciences databases ASSIA, IBSS, Psycinfo, SocINDEX EBSCO and Proquest search screens Newspapers and news services Finding grey literature Advanced Google searching Google Scholar settings Getting material outside of the library collection

A guide to searching, including: ~ How searching works ~ Boolean operators ~ Phrase searching and proximity searching ~ Truncation and wildcards ~ Field searching – how to use it ~ Using controlled vocabulary and database thesauri ~ Complementary search techniques – citation searching

A guide on using Library Search, the main search tool on the Library homepage. The guide gives you information on what Library Search is, what information it indexes and how to use it effectively. You can use the contents pages to jump to the information you need, including searching, understanding search results and useful features like previews, citing literature and saving and exporting results.

A guide for Social Science students on how to find and use secondary data. Information includes: ~Sources on doing secondary data analysis – case studies, videos and practice datasets ~Ethical considerations when using secondary data ~Guides on getting started using data from the UK Data Service ~Major national and international databanks and key open-source data ~Specialist collections of data (subscriptions available from the University of Glasgow) including data on countries, demographics, companies (including financials), consumers, markets and industries. ~Sources of data from published literature

A short guide with links to appraisal tools for evaluating information sources for credibility, authority, bias and relevance. ~CRAAP Test (California State University) ~PROMPT Tool (Open University) ~CASP Checklists (Critical Appraisal Skills Programme, Oxford)