General Information - H 303: A Toolbox for Thesis Orientation - Class Research Guides at Western Oregon University

Tips for Researching your Thesis

Remember that research is a reiterative process. You'll do some library searching, read, discover leads you need to follow or holes you need to fill, and come back to do more searching.
Leave time for delivery of materials through Interlibrary Loan. Physical items coming from other Summit libraries typically take 2-3 business days to arrive, those coming from non-Summit libraries take a few weeks.
Look for personal account features within the information resources you use. Features vary, but typically the accounts allow you to

save your searches for later use,

set up email alerts and/or RSS feeds for new material that meets your search criteria,

save articles and organize them into folders,

and set personal preferences for the interface.

Managing Long-term Research

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Use personal accounts for storage and for staying current

Database accounts are an important tool to assist you with long-term research and to manage information. With the exception of the My Library account, where you log in with your name & V number, you will need to create your own account on the site after you enter through the library's access. Specific features vary, but typically the accounts allow you to

save your searches for later use,
set up email alerts and/or RSS feeds for new material that meets your search criteria,
save articles and organize them into folders,
and set personal preferences for the interface.

My Library

Gathers your WOU library checkout records, including Summit & Interlibrary Loan orders. Under "preferences," opt in to save your checkout history from now onward.

WorldCat Sign in

Save searches and make lists of materials in Summit, and beyond.

My EBSCOhost

EBSCO is the vendor that delivers many of our databases, such as Academic Search Premier, MLA International Bibliography, Professional Development Collection (for educators), the Teacher Reference Center, and many others.

My WilsonWeb

Currently, the library gets the databases Education Full Text + ERIC, as well as retrospective indexing (c. 1890-1980) for popular magazines and for humanities and social science literature through Wilson. However, EBSCO has purchased Wilson and so as of December 31, 2011, My WilsonWeb folders will no longer be accessible.

MyJSTOR

EasyBib

EasyBib is an online tool that helps you collect citation information, keep track of your sources, take notes, outline, and generate a references list in MLA, APA, or Chicago/Turabian styles.

Google

Set alerts for when new pages come on the free web that meet your search criteria; read your RSS feeds; save items from Google Books to my library (not related to WOU's My Library), use lots of other online tools.

Delicious and CiteULike

Save your favorite websites to a online bookmarking & social networking site and access them from any computer. They provide browser buttons to make it simple to bookmark and tag a page with as many keywords as you want, or you can connect to your bookmarking site via the ubiquitous AddThis or ShareThis icons. Other features include seeing what sites other people are bookmarking, setting up networks of fellow users of the service, and sharing your groups of bookmarks. Delicious is a generalist site, while CiteULike focuses on scholarly publications and on grabbing all of the required information for proper citation formatting.

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Interlibrary Loan

Log in to check your interlibrary loan and Summit requests to retrieve articles to place a new request to renew items
Frequently Asked Questions		Copyright policy

Interlibrary loan is a service provided by Library and Media Services to support the research and teaching needs of students, faculty and staff at Western Oregon University.

For assistance placing requests, contact the Reference Desk (503.838.8899 or email refdesk@wou.edu).
For questions regarding the status of your placed requests, call 503.838.8884 or email ilibloan@wou.edu.

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