This web page is intended to help you with your ENSC 105 assignments. Also refer to the research guides for Engineering Science and Computing Science for general information. 

If you need help, please contact Jenna Walsh, Liaison Librarian at 778.782.7419 or jmwalsh@sfu.ca or Ask a librarian.

PowerPoint (Surrey, Spring 2012)

Getting started

Identify your research topic:

Your first step is to identify the information that you are trying to find.  Although you have the same broad topic for both of your assignments, you will be looking for different information for each paper.  You will need to find sufficient background information for your informative paper. Then, you will need to find sources to bolster your argument on a controversial aspect of the topic for your persuasive paper.     

Identify words for your search:

Before you start searching, it's best to brainstorm keywords.  Let's say you're topic is electronic monitoring of employees. You might find some good information by simply using these words, but many sources will not use those exact words.  Here are the two main ideas and some other possible words to use for searching:

• electronic monitoring: performance monitoring, surveillance, privacy, legislation, rights
• employees: employee, workplace, work, workers
  

Time-saving search tip: truncation ( * )

• Truncation symbols allow you to search for all variations of a word at once by searching for all the words beginning with the letters before the symbol.
  • For example, employ* will search for employee, employees, employer, employers, employment, etc. 
     

Finding background information & books

You should begin your research by looking for background information on your topic.  This information is often found in reference books (e.g., encyclopedias, handbooks).  After you have found the necessary background information on your topic, you can search for articles. (Without some foundational knowledge on the topic, scholarly articles will typically be very difficult to understand.)

The reference books that are useful to you will depend on your topic.  Here are some online reference books that might include background information on your topic:

• Gale Virtual Reference Library (a large collection of reference books in many subject areas, including science and technology)
• Sage eReference (collection of many encyclopedias related to the social sciences)
• Encyclopaedia Britannica
• The Internet Encyclopedia (3 volumes): A-F, G-O, and P-Z.
• Ethical and Social Issues in the Information Age
• Encyclopedia of New Media
  

There are many other good resources (online and in print) listed in the "Background Information" sections of the Engineering Science and Computing Science research guides.

To find relevant information on your topic in online and print books, use the SFU Library catalogue or the Fast Search box.  When you find a book on your topic, look at its SUBJECT HEADINGS.  When I searched for employee monitoring, I received a number of books on the topic that could be relevant.  (Note: If you are using Fast Search, you can limit your results to books on the left side of the screen by simply check the box for 'Books' under "Content Type")  Each book has a number of subject headings that you can use to find books about your topic.  Here are a few subject headings for the book Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: Controversies and Solutions: Electronic monitoring in the workplace; Privacy, Right of; and Supervision of employees.  You can click on any subject heading to find more books about the same topic.

For help with the catalogue, ask a librarian or see the SFU Library Catalogue Search Guide.
 

Finding articles

It is difficult to give a list of the top resources for finding articles because your topics can vary greatly.  That said, Fast Search is a good place to begin your search.  After your initial search, you can use the left side of the screen to limit your results (e.g., to only include articles from scholarly publications).  However, Fast Search does not search through all of the Library's online and print resources.  Therefore, you will want to use other resources as well.  Here are some suggestions for other places to try (which ones you use will depend on your topic):

Resources that include academic articles:

• Academic Search Premier: Articles from academic and popular journals in a variety of disciplines, including biological and medical sciences, public administration, computer sciences, and engineering.
• Science Indexes: Citations for articles on science, applied science, and technology.
  
• PAIS International: Citations for articles related to public and social policy.
• Google Scholar: Search engine that includes scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.
• IEEE/IET Electronic Library: A database of worldwide literature in physics, electronics and electrical engineering, computers and control, and information technology.
• ACM Online Guide to Computing Literature: Fulltext of all journals and conference proceedings published by the Association for Computing Machinery, plus selected material in computer science from other publishers.
  
• GEOBASE: Citations for articles in fields such as geography, geology and ecology. A good resource for researching environmental issues .
• INSPEC: Contains citations to articles in electronics and electrical engineering, computers and control, and information technology.
• Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science: A collection of over 1000 online volumes from this core series in computing science.
• Applied Science and Technology Index: Citations for articles on applied science and technology topics such as engineering, computer science, and robotics.
  

Other resources (e.g., newspaper articles, reports):

• Canadian Newsstand: Fulltext articles for major Canadian newspapers such as Globe & Mail and Vancouver Sun, as well as some local papers.
• CBCA Complete: Includes articles from many Canadian newspapers, popular magazines, and scholarly journals.
• Canadian Public Policy Collection: Publications from a variety of Canadian public policy institutes, research institutes, think tanks, advocacy groups, government agencies and university research centers.
• Canadian Points of View Reference Centre: Includes overviews of many controversial topics related to Canada.
   

---

Evaluating your sources

The quality of your assignment is dependent on the quality of the sources you use for it. That's one good reason to think critically about the sources you use.

The difference between scholarly and popular sources

It's important to understand the difference between scholarly journals and popular ones. Here is an overview of their main differences:

For more information, see What is a scholarly journal?

The peer-review process is the process by which articles are selected for publication in scholarly journals. Before being accepted for publication, articles submitted by academics to scholarly journals are reviewed by their peers (i.e. by other academics in the field, who are on the editorial board for the journal). This ensures that the research published in scholarly journals meets certain standards of quality in terms of how the research was done, how the articles are written, and whether or not the articles contribute anything new or significant to the field.
 

Evaluating what you find on the web

Unlike academic journals, which carefully examine the quality of articles before they are published, anyone can publish on the web. This means the quality of information you find on the web can vary widely. Remember, just because a site comes up on your Google search doesn't mean it has any guarantee of quality.

Citing sources

It is always important to cite your sources. Citing your sources allows you to give credit to the original researchers, to point your reader(s) to where you found information, and to show that you know how to correctly cite sources.

SFU Library has created several citation style guides, including the following:

• APA style guide
• MLA style guide
• Chicago/Turabian style guide
   

If you have questions about doing research or citing your sources, please ask a librarian.