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ANTH 4050

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Anthropology Librarian

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Brenda Smith
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Introduction

This guide is to help you with your media journal and research paper for ANTH 4050. Here you'll find research help, recommended library resources, tips for finding resources online, and citation information.

Don't forget that you can always contact your librarian, Brenda, for help!

Your Topic

Getting Started with Your Topic

Thinking of a topic might be difficult.

TIP: Use the same topic for your media journal and your research project. It reduces the amount of work for you in familiarizing yourself with a topic.

Try browsing one of the Indigenous news websites listed on the websites tab to get an idea of what topics are available if you are stuck. You can also scroll through your regular news outlets or social media: what is being talked about right now?


Too big of a topic will quickly overwhelm you with sources. You may need to narrow down your topic. Think about what aspects of the topic are currently being discussed in the media. Maybe a politician recently made a comment that sparked a debate, maybe a new piece of evidence was revealed, or maybe new actions are being taken.


How is your topic being talked about in the media? Think about:

  • colloquial language: how would people refer to a concept in day-to-day life?
  • is there a particular phrase that keeps being used and discussed in different contexts?
  • synonyms for your topic/terms
  • other aspects of your topic: the news might be more interested in one part of your topic than another
  • important people of your topic
  • tone differences: you might think "respectful protest," but a headline might read "attackers of..."

Thinking outside the box and using these points to think about your topic will help you search for sources more effectively.

Staying Organized

Staying Organized

Organization will be key for this assignment. Below are some handouts that will help you keep track of what you search and what you find. If you keep track of everything now, later on when you go to write your paper it will be much easier!

Tips and Tricks

Some of these tips might seem basic or obvious, but they will help you avoid losing track of your research and stay on track.

  • Keep track of what you searched, and where you searched.
    • What keywords did you use and in what database?
    • You might think you will remember what search worked the best, but when you go to repeat the search next week you may find that you're mistaken!
    • Use the Database Search Log above to get you started.
  • Save screenshots of what you find online, especially tweets and comments.
    • Anything you find online can be deleted at any time.
    • Name your screenshots so you can find them when you are writing your paper.
    • Make sure you also save a URL so you can cite comments and tweets properly.
  • Identify a naming convention for your screenshots and downloaded files and use it consistently to organize them so you can easily find files later on.
  • Save more than you think you will need, but not so much that you will get overwhelmed.
  • Try using the above Sample Data Collection Spreadsheet to sort your resources.
    • You can organize them by the tone of the article or comment, what side of an issue the author was on, or however makes the most sense to you.

Finding Resources - Library

Search the Library

Nexis Uni

Nexis Uni (formerly known as LexisNexis Academic) has full text articles from newspapers from around the world, including Canada, from national papers to small local papers like Alaska Highway News (Fort St. John). It contains mostly mainstream media. It has some Indigenous-run media sources, such as Windspeaker.

Tips for searching Nexis Uni:
  • Use the main search bar
  • You can use advanced search techniques in the search bar like quotation marks, AND/OR, and parentheses.
  • Use the switch labeled Group Duplicates to hide identical articles
  • View results by relevance, but also sort Newest to Oldest to find the latest news and Oldest to Newest to find first time anything about the story appeared
  • Use the limiters on the left side of search results. For example:
    • Sources by Location to see where the story spread around the world (NOTE: Canada is listed under International)
    • Sources can give you an overview of which individual publications are publishing about this topic.
    • Timeline to see how much was published over time
  • Do not save the URL of an article from the address bar. Instead, use the instructions below on how to link to articles

Search alerts are not available for this database. However, you can create a "link to this page" that you can then rerun whenever you want:

  • Click Actions at top of the search results screen and then on "link to this page"
  • Copy and paste the link somewhere safe
  • Click on the link regularly to see what's new. Be sure that the sort is set to "date newest" to see what's new.

Nexis Uni: Making Permalinks

  1. Search Nexis Uni for an article of interest and select the title to open the full text.
  2. Click on the link icon at the top of the page.
  3. On the resulting popup box, select the full URL, and copy the entire link.
  4. Before pasting the URL into Moodle, add this prefix to the front of your link: https://ezproxy.tru.ca/login?url=
  5. In this example, your share link will now look like this:  https://ezproxy.tru.ca/login?url=https://advance.lexis.com/api/permalink/659dcb82-af1a-4fa8-a9a5-fe4ca315f55c/?context=1519360&identityprofileid=4WQG6R38761
  6. Copy the modified share link and paste it into Moodle. Do not upload PDFs directly as this violates licensing restrictions.
Link icon beside article title.
The link icon is located next to the article title.
 
Permalink pop-up box
Permanent link pop-up box.

Canadian Newsstream

CBCA Complete includes Canadian news content, including CBC transcripts and magazines. However, it does not have smaller/local publications, so smaller stories may not have as many resources in this database.

Tips for searching Canadian Newsstream:

  • Sort results by "Most Recent First" to find the latest news
  • Use the limiters on the left side of search results. For example, Publication Name can give you an overview of where news is coming from.

Search Alerts: You can set up an alert that will send you an email with newly published materials that match your search. Once you have created a good search:

  1. Click Save search/alert on the top right of your results list.
  2. Choose Create alert.
  3. Fill out the form with your email. I recommend including search details (so you remember what your search was), sending weekly, and sending the alert even when no new documents match your search (so you remember!).

CBCA Complete

CBCA Complete includes Canadian news content, including CBC transcripts and magazines. However, it does not have smaller/local publications, so smaller stories may not have as many resources in this database.

Tips for searching CBCA Complete:

  • Sort results by "Most Recent First" to find the latest news
  • Under Source Type, you can exclude sources you don't need. For instance, scholarly journals and dissertations & theses are not relevant for this assignment, and you may have found most newspapers in LexisNexis.
  • Use the limiters on the left side of search results. For example, Publication Name can give you an overview of where news is coming from.

Search Alerts: You can set up an alert that will send you an email with newly published materials that match your search. Once you have created a good search:

  1. Click Save search/alert on the top right of your results list.
  2. Choose Create alert.
  3. Fill out the form with your email. I recommend including search details (so you remember what your search was), sending weekly, and sending the alert even when no new documents match your search (so you remember!).

Finding Resources - Grey Literature

What is Grey Literature?

Sometimes the information you need to answer a research question will not be found in academic articles or books. Maybe you need to know the government regulations on a topic, or what a community's resources for housing are.

Grey literature is information that is not published through traditional means (in books, articles, etc.). It often comes from organizations that do not usually publish information and may be more current than commercially published material.

Common examples of grey literature include:

  • Government documents
  • Theses and dissertations
  • Organizational reports
  • Conference proceedings
  • White papers
  • Pamphlets
  • Speeches
  • Newsletters

Some of these material types you can find through library searching, but for others you will need to turn to the web.

Finding Grey Literature

While organizations may not publish their information commercially, much of this information is still available online. This might include reports, fact sheets, pamphlets, newsletters, and other information they make public on their website.


There are two key ways you can find this information:

  • Search or browse on organization websites. Often there is a search bar, and you can always browse through menus to find the topic you are interested in.
    • Tip: Look for sections with names such as Documents, Reports, or Library
  • Search for either the organization or topic that you are interested in in Google.
    • add filetype:pdf to your Google search to only find PDF documents. Many of the documents you will be interested in will be in PDF form, so this will help you find them.

The "Websites" tab on most subject guides will have several places you can get started with finding organizations and other material on the web.


Examples of grey literature:

Government documents can include Acts and other legislation, policies, and information for the public such as available services, benefit information, and regulations.

Most of this information can be found on either the government of Canada website, or on the websites of the provinces governments.

If you are looking for information about a particular act, make sure you know what it is called in full and search for this full title of the act in Google. This is a quick and easy way to start finding information about an act.

The resources below and in the 'Websites" tab on most subject guides will help you get started with finding government information.


Examples of government documents:

Discover and many databases (including CBCA) have limiters for theses and dissertations. Look for these limiters (often checkboxes) on the sidebar of your search results.

You can also find theses written by previous graduate students from TRU:

Visit this guide to learn more about finding dissertations and theses:

Conference proceedings often consist of the most up to date research in a field, since researchers may report on their findings at a conference before an academic paper is published.

Discover and many databases have a limiter for conference materials. Look for these limiters (often checkboxes) on the sidebar of your search results.

In Web of Science, underneath the search bar in the menu "More Settings," choose "Conference Proceedings Citation Index- Social Science & Humanities (CPCI-SSH) --1990-present" to find conference materials.

You can also search the internet for conferences to find presentations.

 


 

Lots of grey literature is available online. Did you know there are easy ways to filter what you find from Google searching? Go to Google’s little-known Advanced Search page to find many filters:

Screenshot of part of google advanced search page.

Some of the most useful tools are:

  • Site or domain: For example, if you want to find only things published by the government of Canada, put .gc.ca in this box. All your results will have that domain.
    • Another example is if you want to find resources from the World Health Organization only: enter who.int in this box
  • File type: many reports are in PDF format, so you can choose appropriately from the file type box.
  • Usage Rights: This is very useful if you want to find images that can be used freely.
     

Tip: Researching about another country?

  • Find out its national domain name and enter that in the site or domain box. For example, you could enter .in for resources from India.
  • Choose the region and/or language to find materials from that country/in the right language. Google can often translate for you if you don’t know the local language!

 

Evaluating Grey Literature

Because grey literature is (usually) not peer-reviewed, it is extra important to carefully evaluate the reliability of these sources. Some questions to consider include:

  • Is this information still relevant, or is it out of date?
  • Who produced this information? Do they have a stake in promoting the information in a certain way?
    • For example, companies may prefer if a study portrays their product in a positive light.
  • Why does this information exist? Is it to aid professionals, inform the public, promote a product...?

Finding Resources - Web

Finding Resources: Web

Searching on the internet can find a variety of sources. Google is your best bet to find Indigenous-run sources, and to find an ongoing conversation in the form of comments and tweets.

Google Tips

  • Not many, but some library techniques will work in Google: use quotation marks for phrase searching; use OR (must be all caps) to search synonyms or related terms
  • Choose News then Tools to find some limiters: you can sort by most recent or only results from the last week
  • Check for comments on news websites; this is where a great deal of discussion can take place
  • Don't feel limited to news results: websites like Wikipedia can be a great place to get an overview of a topic and gather some vocabulary words for searching
  • Google has come to an agreement with the Government of Canada re: the Online News Act so Canadians can continue to access news via Google

Social Media

  • You can no longer search X (formerly Twitter) without having an account.
  • Is there a hashtag commonly used for your story?
  • If there is too much activity on X, look at some overall numbers: how many posts (formerly known as tweets) in the last day? How many replies to one specific post?
  • With Canada's Online News Act, Meta no longer makes news content available to Canada via their services, Facebook and Instagram and is not interested in coming to an agreement the way Google did. For the purposes of this assignment, please note that this decision to pull news content has impacted Indigenous news and communities
  • Facebook is often not a place of civil discussion of controversial events: it used to be can be a good place to find comments on news articles, but proceed with caution. You won't find news articles anymore, but may find discussion about news topics that you can then go and try and find the original news sources. Or, a post may provide a link but purposely "break it" by adding spaces
  • Instagram and TikTok: Lot of Indigenous creators talking about Indigenous issues. Note that TikTok has a problematic history with suppressing material.
  • Reddit
  • Comments on social media can be plentiful, but also really brutal to read

Indigenous-run Media Sources

Indigenous-run media sources

It can be difficult to find Indigenous voices in mainstream media. Several of the links under Canadian Alternative News Sources are Indigenous-run. In particular, check out:

Screenshots and Plugins

Screenshots

Anything on the internet might change from day to day. Take screen captures of tweets, comments, online news articles...anything that could change or get deleted.

  • Windows: ctrl-alt-print screen OR Fn+print screen OR use the snipping tool.
  • Mac: shift-command-3 OR shift-command-4

The browser plugins below are useful because they will capture the whole webpage you are on (instead of taking a screenshot, scrolling down, taking another, etc.)

Citation Tips

APA Resources

Chicago Style Resources