UW System libraries are testing an article recommender service (bX Recommender) until March 26. Try it and tell us what you think of it! It suggests additional relevant articles, similar to “More Like This” or “If You Liked This, You’ll Also Like…” on sites such as Amazon. Recommendations are based on article usage by nearly 2,000 users at research institutions around the world. Learn more about it on our database trials web page.
How do you use it? After doing a search in a database or SuperSearch, just click the 
button! However, not every article will have recommendations for additional articles, especially newer articles that not many researchers have looked at yet! See a screenshot below.
How do I provide feedback? Complete a brief online survey. Thank you!!
Whether you are casting about for a topic for a research paper, or doing research on a topic you’ve already selected, this resource may help you:
CQ Researcher explores a potentially controversial, “hot” topic in each weekly issue. You will find statistics, history, a chronology of relevant events, maps, legislative actions, and experts supporting their side of a pro/con question related to the issue of the week.
For example, the Feb. 26 issue explores cybersecurity. The leading article is “Are U.S. military and civilian computer systems safe?” The pro/con question is “Should the government regulate private-sector cybersecurity?” The issue includes a discussion of legislation over the years to deal with increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks, starting with “Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — the first federal legislation specifically dealing with computer security.” Other sections of the issue discuss the current situation and the outlook for the future. There is also a bibliography of sources.
Other recent topics have been sleep deprivation, press freedom, animal rights, sex scandals, modernizing the grid, and professional football.
Have you been told by your professor to use scholarly or peer-reviewed articles for your research paper? Wondering what that means and how to get them?
Peer-reviewed (or refereed) journals send submitted manuscripts to other experts in the same discipline so that they can assess the quality of the potential article before it’s accepted for publication.
Many article databases offer a check box that limits results to scholarly/peer-reviewed publications. However, the results may include book reviews, etc., that you would not want even though they were published in scholarly journals.
Look for the characteristics of a scholarly article, which are listed on the Library’s guide “Scholarly Journal vs. Popular Magazine Articles.” There’s a YouTube video from another library called “Magazines vs. Scholarly Journals” to view: 
You also can look up a publication’s title in UlrichsWeb, which describes journals, magazines, etc.
If in doubt, ask a librarian for help!
UW System libraries are testing bX Recommender until Feb. 28. Try it and tell us what you think of it!
bX Recommender is a scholarly article recommender service. It suggests additional relevant articles, similar to “More Like This” or “If You Liked This, You’ll Also Like…” on sites such as Amazon. Recommendations are based on article usage by nearly 2,000 users at research institutions around the world. Learn more about it on our database trials web page.
How do you use it? After doing a search in a database or SuperSearch, just click the button! However, not every article will have recommendations for additional articles, especially newer articles that not many researchers have looked at yet! See a screenshot below.
How do I provide feedback? Complete a survey at https://milwaukee.qualtrics.com/SE?SID=SV_6tfBduAXuyTqroo&SVID=Prod
Thank you!!
Where can you find scholarly/peer-reviewed articles on dialects?
Try these article databases:
I’ve gotten a few questions about needing to find articles from the Wall Street Journal. Conveniently enough, we have access to WSJ back to 1984 through Proquest’s ABI/Inform.
Once you’ve gone to ABI/Inform, there are two ways in which you can search for articles from only the Wall Street Journal:
- Use the advanced search: in one of the boxes, enter wall street journal and then select Publication Title from the drop-down menu to the right of the search box.
- The Publications tab at the top allows you to view the list of newspaper, magazine and journal titles that are contained in ABI. Search for wall street journal – the resulting link will take you to a page in which you can exclusively search the WSJ.
The Library Catalog had a significant upgrade right before Orientation Week (convenient timing, isn’t it?!).
We’ve named our new catalog HalCat (short for Harold Andersen Library Catalog). It needs more tweaking, and we are experiencing some technical difficulties with its functionality (which are not local), so please bear with us.
If you want to search other UW System campus library catalogs and borrow materials, either click on the “Universal Borrowing” link on the Library home page’s left sidebar, or once in the catalog click on “Change” on the line where it tells you what catalog you are searching (and then scroll down to click on “Select”):
Database:UW-Whitewater (HAL CAT) Change
After you do a search and you are looking at the record for a title you want to borrow, look at the blue box on the right side of the display. Click on “Make a Request” and log in when prompted.
Yesterday morning and again this morning we are all getting an error message when we try to use this capability. I hope they can fix it again so we can all use it later today…and we apologize for any inconvenience.
I admit that my computers have Google search boxes at the ready all the time. But recently I read something about jux2, which tries to combine the best results from Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live Search. These search engines had the top U.S. search engine shares according to Nielsen Online’s December 2008 data. However, comparisons of search results suggest there is less overlap between search results using these search engines than most people might expect (“typically sharing fewer than 3.5 of their top 10 results”).
Well, so I tried jux2. I wasn’t that impressed, but you should try it for yourself.
My test was “swine flu” and I liked Google’s results, because the Centers for Disease Control’s page was the first result listed. Yahoo at least had it within the first 5 results. All three search engines returned Wikipedia as one of the first resources, of course. I was still very satisfied with what I got using Google.
UC Berkeley’s Library has a web page on “Recommended Search Engines” that lists Google, Yahoo, and Exalead. They note that searching Google alone is not always sufficient, and recommend getting a “second opinion” using another search engine. You should also note, as they do, that “The contents of most of the searchable databases mounted on the web, such as library catalogs and article databases, are excluded because search engine spiders cannot access them. All this material is referred to as the “Invisible Web” — what you don’t see in search engine results.
However, for those concerned about searching for academic resources, things may be changing. The article “How Scholarly Is Google Scholar? A Comparison to Library Databases” (College and Research Libraries, May 2009) “found that Google Scholar is, on average, 17.6% more scholarly than materials found only in library databases and that there is no statistically significant difference between the scholarliness of materials found in Google Scholar across disciplines.” Why isn’t this worrying me? Well, you still need access to the full text of the articles and other resources a discovery tool like Google Scholar lists–yup, usually subscription resources you access through your library.
Interested in learning more about your kinfolk? Don’t know where to start? Attend the FREE informal presentation this Saturday in Whitewater.
Who: Walworth County Genealogical Society
What: “Who, What, Where, When & Why: This is for YOU” presentation. Designed to be an introduction to doing genealogical research.
When: SAT. MAY 16th, 9:30 A.M.
Where: Irvin L. Young Public Library, 431 Center St., Whitewater, WI.
Cost: FREE
After attending be sure to contact the Area Research Center in the UW-Whitewater Library to begin your search. We are here to help you discover your roots, regardless of where you came from.
Here’s a couple of the books we have in Special Collections that can be helpful to beginners just getting started.
Unpuzzling Your Past
The Genealogist’s Handbook
Land & Property Research in the United States
Hope to see you soon. –UW-W Archives Staff
Are you writing a research paper? Please avoid contextomy, which is distorting meaning by quoting of context. You can read more about it in the 2005 article “Contextomy: the art of quoting out of context” (Media, Culture & Society, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 511-522).
Avoiding unintended contextomy may be as simple as making sure you understand the original text of the sources you’re using for your paper. When you encounter words you don’t understand, look them up using:
- your favorite print dictionary (We have several in the Library!),
- Google (search for define:<your word here>, e.g., define:contextomy), or
- your favorite online dictionary (We link to several at http://library.uww.edu/subject/dict.html).
And if you are interested in growing your vocabulary one word a day, the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) online has a Word of the Day RSS feed for you, or you can click to get a random word every time you visit the site!
