Effective Library Research Skills Identifying Background Information Locating Books Searching Journal and Newspaper Articles Getting remote access to electronic resources

Finding Information on the Internet Internet Surfing Citing Internet and Electronic Resources

Effective Library Research Skills

Quality research requires the technique of locating information to establish facts on the research topic. One key to success is to use the library resources effectively. The following outlines a simple and effective strategy for finding library resources.

• Identifying Background Information

Basic reference tools help you to identify information from general to broader context of your research. The most common background sources include encyclopedia and dictionaries, bibliographies, almanacs and yearbooks, biographies, indexes and abstracts, and government documents. These reference sources are located in the Reference Room on the 1/F of the University Library.

Search Tips: Consult Reference Librarians to find an appropriate reference source for your topic.

• Locating Books

Search the Library Catalogue to find books related to your topic. If you are unsure about the author and title, you can start your search by using keyword. A Keyword Search looks for all the words you enter, and look anywhere in the author, title, subject, table of contents, and note fields. The Subject Search uses official Library of Congress subject headings and is helpful to find books on a particular subject.

You can also search the catalogue of other Hong Kong libraries via the CUHK Library Catalogue.

Search Tips: To make a comprehensive search of the library catalogue, you can start with keyword searching. Then look at the records you find and identify the Library of Congress subject headings for your topic. Click these headings to do a new subject search. The combination of searching keyword and subject will give you a more comprehensive title list for your topic.

For instance, type the keywords "merge and acquisition". Then select any record from the result list and you will find that the most frequently used subject is "Consolidation and merger of corporations". Click this heading to locate more records on the topic.

• Searching Journal and Newspaper Articles

Journal and newspaper articles provide current and detailed information on a topical issue. Try the following ways to locate articles :

• Journals

Use Indexes and Abstracts to find scholarly journal articles. Then check the Library Catalogue to see if the library owns the journal you want. Teaching staff, postgraduate students, and the final year of undergraduate students can use the document delivery services to order articles that the CUHK Library does not own.

The indexes and abstracts, covering journals from a variety of subject areas, are in print or electronic formats or both. To identify an appropriate electronic database for your topic, you can click Databases [Subject] on the Library Homepage. You will find a list of databases under different subject categories.

The Library has also subscribed over 75,000 electronic journals and many full-text electronic databases. You may consult reference librarians on which electronic databases are available for your research topic.

• Newspapers

Many electronic databases provide full-text newspaper articles, including Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe, INFOBANK, Hong Kong NewsBot, WiseNews, etc. At the Library Homepage, you can also check other newswires or newspaper databases under the heading E-News

Search Tips: To be successful at any kind of electronic database searching, you need to know some basic searching techniques. Below are some examples:

And: Narrow a search result; all terms must be present in the articles retrieved.
e.g. "civil service reform and hong kong"

Or : Broaden a search result; at least one of the terms is required to be present in the articles retrieved.
e.g. "civil service or public service"

Not: Narrow a search result; retrieve records containing one term but not another.
e.g. "china not hong kong"

? A substitute for one character or none.
e.g. "wom?n" retrieves" woman", "women"

* A substitute for any string of zero or more characters.
e.g." comput*" retrieves "computer", "computers", "computing", etc.

• Getting remote access to electronic resources

Due to license restrictions, most of the databases and e-journals can be accessed by CUHK students and staff only. Access must be via the Dial-up Services, VPN Connection Service, the Library's proxy server service or Easy Access.

• Internet Surfing

Internet is a global network of computer networks that provides a wealth of current and invaluable information on a wide variety of subjects. However, searching Internet is not as easy as searching library catalogue. Doing a successful search on the Internet you need to know more about the search methods and capabilities of search engines.

Search engines help you to explore the information on the web. Basically, there are two major types of search engines: Subject Directories (e.g. Yahoo) and Keyword Search (e.g. Altavista). The former allows you to browse the appropriate subject and then follow the hyperlinks to reach the specific information required. They are good as a starting point for browsing information on the web. For comprehensiveness, you may try keyword search engines. Here follows a brief introduction to some popular search engines:

Altavista	Altavista, indexing over one billion web sites, is one of the largest and most comprehensive search engines on the web. It provides quality results in response to many general and broad searches, through its simple and advanced search capabilities. There are 25 languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which can be specified for searching.
Google	Currently the largest search engine and indexes more than three billion web pages. It is a full-text index that searches the entire HTML file and gives results based on popularity of links returned. Language capabilities include web searches to 35 languages including major European and East Asian languages.
Lycos	Lycos is one of the earliest search and navigation sites designed to help people find information more easily and quickly in the cyber world. In addition to the search engine, the Lycos offers additional services such as a classified directory of selected and rated web sites, Sidesearch, etc.
Yahoo	Yahoo is the most essential subject directory, which allows you to select sites from the hierarchically arranged subject index. Since it has developed over a long time with editorial care, the quality is very high. It also provides both simple and advanced searches.

There are some search engines that accept Chinese. For example, 雅虎中文, 蕃薯藤, 悠游 (GoYoYo), and 新浪網香港.

You may be interested to know that the Associative Chinese search engine on GoYoYo was developed at CUHK and used by GoYoYo under licence. A CUHK PHD graduate was instrumental in that work.

You may also try to search in Meta-Search Engines, which group together a number of search engines (e.g. Altavista, Infoseek, etc.) that support keyword searching. These convenient tools will return a compilation of results as if you have searched all of each search engine individually. The details of Meta-Search Engines can be found at the following URL: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/MetaSearch.html

Search Tips: Most of the search engines use the Boolean Operators AND(+), OR(-), and NOT between terms to focus a search. Some use quotation marks to bind phrase together (e.g. "civil service reform"). To know more about the search methods of each search engine, click on its 'help' or 'tips' button to locate the search guide.

• Citing Internet and Electronic Resources

To cite Internet and electronic resources, you may read books such as The Columbia Guide to Online Style (UL Reference  PN171.F56 W35 1998), Electronic Styles: a Handbook for Citing Electronic Information (CC  PN171.F56 L5 1996), MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (UL Reference  PN147.G444 1998) , Research Writing Using Traditional and Electronic Sources (CC  LB2369.J64 1999), Web Research: Selecting, Evaluating, and Citing (UL ZA4201.R33 2002), etc. Many web sites also provide guidelines for citing electronic resources and some useful sites are listed as follows:  

APA Style - Electronic References

Citation Style Guides for Internet and Electronic Sources

How to Cite Electronic Sources

Online! Citation Styles

Online Writing Lab at Purdue University: Using MLA Format

You are always welcome to consult Reference Librarians for advice on locating information. The Library also provides electronic reference services, which enable you to send enquiries via the web page of Ask a Reference Librarian.