Last revised: August 23, 2007

ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES 298G

Scope: This tutorial is intended to support the assignments in AAST298G, “Asian American Foodways,” taught by Jane Dusselier.

Table of Contents

• Using Web Sources
• Reference Books
• How to Search the Catalog & the Databases
• Catalog
• How to Use Research Port
• Research Port Databases
• Other Tools

Using Web Sources

Often students think they can get all of the information they need merely by using a search engine such as Google to browse the Internet. Although some useful information may be found this way, this is not the primary route for scholarly research:

• General Internet searches will yield only a very small percentage of the "scholarly" information that is available on a given topic. Scholarly information is controlled by copyright and thus is available primarily through scholarly journals or through databases, such as the Libraries' Research Port databases, that index these journals. So rather than making data available free on the Internet, scholarly information is controlled by publishers and researchers who want to get paid for their efforts. The Libraries pay for costly subscriptions to scholarly journals and to the Research Port database so that UMCP students and faculty can have free access to this scholarly information.
  
  
• Another reason that one should not rely solely on browsing the Net to get scholarly data is that there is no control over the validity of the information. Anyone can create a Web page; consequently, much data in many Web sites contains errors or may be intentionally distorted (e.g. due to a particular political bias).
  
  
• Despite these constraints, researchers occasionally still can get good information by browsing the Internet, but only after carefully evaluating that Web Site and its data. The Libraries have created a guide to Evaluating Web Sites to help students do just that.

• Here are some Asian American gateways to Internet sites:
  
  
  • Asian American Studies Resource Guide. This site provides access to research resources available through the Internet based on Asian American studies.
    
    
  • Yale University. (Asian American) Research Resources..
    
    

return to top

return to top

How to Search the Catalog & the Databases

The Catalog lists books and other materials that are actually owned by the University of Maryland Libraries. Search here to find books, videos, journals (the titles, not the actual articles), and other material that are part of the Libraries' collection.

Research Port is a gateway to databases and electronic journals to which the Libraries subscribe. Use these databases to search for journal articles (and often to other materials). This is explained in more detail below under "Research Port Databases."

When searching the Catalog or Databases, you will have most success if you use Boolean logic:

• Boolean logic uses the words AND, OR, and sometimes NOT, to connect key terms. One should use Boolean rather than randomly searching individual terms, or rather than searching a complete prose phrase:
  
  Example: "Describe the relationship between ethnicity and food."
  Instead, you should identify key terms, the most important words in the search phrase
  
  Example: ethnicity food
  and use these terms with the Boolean connectors
  
  Example: ethnicity AND food
  when conducting the search.
  
  
• AND narrows a search, and OR expands it. So, if the search yields too many results, you can reduce the number of "hits" by adding an additional required term and connecting it to the other terms with the word AND. On the other hand, if a search yields too few results, you can enlarge the number of search results by adding an additional term and connecting it to the other terms with the word OR.
  

Other ways to expand or narrow searches:

• If you have few hits, or if you want to conduct a thorough search, search keywords and also words that are related to those keywords (including synonyms and other forms of the word). For example in addition to searching on the phrase, “Asian American,” you can also search on the phrases “Asian Americans,” “Japanese American,” Japanese Americans,” “Chinese American,” and “Chinese Americans.” Similarly, in addition to searching on the word “food,” you can search on the words “foods,” “foodstuffs,” and “foodways.” As instructed previously, connect these related word with the word "OR" in order to get more hits.
  
  
• A shortcut to using multiple forms of a term, is to use a truncation symbol, which acts as a “wild card.” The catalog and most (but not all) databases use an asterisk (*) as the truncation symbol. Thus if you write “food*”, then the database will simultaneously search for the words “foods,” “foodstuffs,” and “foodways.” Or if you search using “ethnic*”, then the database will simultaneously search for “ethnic” and “ethnicity.” So by changing the original search of "ethnicity AND food" to "ethnicity* AND “food*", you will be expanding your search so that it will yield more citations.
  
  
• Another way to narrow searches is by searching for a given term only if it is used in the title or is used as a subject. The catalog and most databases automatically search for the desired term in all or most of the data in a citation (i.e. the database will search for the word in the title, the author, the subject, the abstract or summary of the article, etc.). In most cases one will see the term “Default Fields” or “All Fields” to indicate that all or most of the fields are being searched. If your search produces too many citations, and many of them appear irrelevant to your topic, you may search for the term only if it is listed in the title or as a subject. To do this, change the search menu item from “Default Fields” or “All Fields” to “Title” or “Subject” options. Note: Some databases use the term “Descriptors” instead of “Subject.”
  

return to top

• Searching for Books:

  Search the Libraries' Catalog for books and documents on your topic. Start with a "word/s anywhere" search.
  

  Example: “Asian Americans” and food
  
  Please note that the Catalog does not recognize phrases unless you put the phrase in quotation marks. So, be sure to enclose phases such as “Asian Americans,” Chinese American,” etc. in quotation marks. If you do not, the search engine will search for each word separately. Also note that the Catalog will not search for phrases that are longer than two words.

• Searching for Journals:

  You can also use the Catalog to find out whether the Libraries subscribe to print* copies of a particular journal. Click on the "Journals" button. Then conduct a "title beginning with" search on the JOURNAL TITLE (not on the ARTICLE TITLE).
  
  

  Example: American Asian Review

  In this example, the actual title of the journal is The American Asian Review; however, we dropped “The” from our search. One of the idiosyncrasies of our Catalog is that it does not like searches that begin with articles. So drop “a,” “an,” or “the” from the beginning of searches; otherwise you will get errors.

  You cannot use the Catalog to search the contents of journals for actual articles. To search for journal articles, you need to use Research Port Databases such as those that are listed in the next section of this guide/tutorial.

*Important Note: In addition to print copies of journals, the University of Maryland Libraries subscribe to many journals in electronic format. The Catalog does not list many of the electronic journals to which the Libraries subscibe. Search for these by selecting the "E-Journals" link in Research Port.

Further information about how to use the Catalog is available in an online Catalog Guide.

return to top

How to Use Research Port

• If you are off campus, and select Research Port from the Libraries’ homepage, you will be asked to input your id number and last name. If you are using an on-campus computer you will not be asked to do this.

• When you are on the Research Port page, click on the “Databases” link. You may then look at individual databases by selecting the “by database name” link and clicking the desired title (note: clicking the title is what I recommend) or by clicling the respective magnifying glass icon. Or you may look at lists of all of the databases assigned to a given topic (by selecting the “by subject category” link).

  Some subject categories which might be helpful for this course are: family studies, general/multidisciplinary, nutrition and food science, sociology, and social sciences. I do not recommend that you select the Asian and Asian American studies category at this time, for it currently has an emphasis of Asian rather than Asian American sources.

• For the purposes of this course, you will not need to use the “Quick Search,” the “E-Journals,” or the “Cross Search” options. Most likely you will not need to use “My Research Port” either, though you might find it useful.

return to top

By going to the Libraries' Research Port page, you can get access to the more than 300 bibliographic databases. These databases are indexes that allow users to perform comprehensive searches for journal articles. Such searches will yield either article citations or full-text articles, depending on the respective indexes and articles. In addition to searching journals, most of these indexes also search other types of documents such as conference proceedings, research reports, book and book chapters, and government documents.

If you find a citation for an article that you need, but the full-text does not appear to be available on-line, the next step is for you to hit the “Find It” button. By doing this you will learn if there are possibly full-text source links that did not appear on the previous screen. If there are no full-text links, the “Find It” screen will tell you if the journal that contains the desired article is listed in the Libraries Catalog. If it is, you may click on the Catalog link that appears on the screen to get the call number of the journal. With this call number you can determine library location where you can physically retrieve the journal (and the desired article).

If the Libraries do not own a journal or book that you need, Interlibrary Loan can possibly get it for you. This is a free service offered to all patrons who have a current UM ID. The ILL office will search libraries throughout the nation to get books, periodical articles, dissertations, microforms, government documents, and technical reports that you may need. All you need to do is to submit an Interlibrary Loan Online Request Form. ILL usually receives the requested items in about two weeks. A link to this form is also available on the “Find It” screen.

Databases that might be useful for finding articles for this course include:

• Ethnic Newswatch. You will probably find this database to be the most useful for your assignment. This is a full-text database of 200 publications of the ethnic, minority, and native press.
  
  
• Academic Search Premier . This EBSCO-based tool is a general/multi-disciplinary database comprised of articles from 3000 general, humanities, social science, and science periodicals. (Note: when using this particular database, you may want to check the box to search only “Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals”; otherwise, you will also retrieve articles from popular magazines, which may not be appropriate for your class assignment.)
  

In addition to articles, your instructor may wish for you to find materials in other formats, such as videos, sound recordings, computer files. The "WorldCat" database may help you to locate these types of items. This is also a good source for finding citations of books, including those not owned by the University of Maryland Libraries.

• WorldCat. This is a catalog of books, serial publications, media, visual materials, musical scores, and archival materials in libraries worldwide.
  
  

Also you might wish to search major newspapers, including foreign newspapers:

• LexisNexis Academic is a full-text general/multidisciplinary database that offers a wide range of news, political, legal, business, and reference information in full-text format. Primary source of newspaper articles, including those from the Washington Post and the New York Times, and thus possibly useful for researching newspaper articles about ethnic food.
  
  

Here are additional databases that you might find helpful:

• Family and Society Studies Worldwide. A primary family studies resource, Family & Society Studies Worldwide covers such subjects as anthropology, sociology, psychology, demography, health sciences, education, economics, law, history, and social work. It provides citations and abstracts to professional journals, books, book chapters, conference papers, theses & dissertations, websites & internet documents, selected popular literature, government reports, statistical documents, working papers, and unpubblished material. Dates of coverage are 1970 to the present.
  
  
• PsycInfo is the most comprehensive index in psychology and related fields. It provides citations and abstracts to journal articles, book chapters and books, technical reports, and dissertations. Use this tool for looking at psychological and emotional factors underlying the relationship between food and ethnicity.
  
  
• SocIndex . This EBSCO-based index features more than 1,300,000 records with subject headings from a 15,600 term sociology-specific thesaurus designed by expert lexicographers. This database is a useful supplemental resource because it indexes Sage family studies abstracts and provides full-text articles of numerous family studies journals.
  
  

If you are conducting extensive in-depth research, most likely no one database will meet all of your research needs. It is always a good idea to consult a number of databases--at least one general one plus several subject-specific indexes.

return to top

Other Tools

• The Modern Language Association Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.
  
  This is a style manual for manuscript preparation that will show the correct way to compose the entries in you bibliography. At McKeldin Library, the MLA Handbook is available in the stacks (call number: PN147.G53 2003) and on the Quick Reference shelves, located across from the service desk in the Service Plus Information and Reference Center.
  
  Though the manuals are not directly available electronically, one can get much helpful information about them from the following links:
  
  
  • Citing Sources Using the MLA Handbook. The Libraries have created this page that explains more about this style manual.
    
    
  • Another useful site is "Assembling a List of Works Cited in Your Paper". Created by Duke University, this site provides quick and easy directions for creating citations for articles and books. This tool shows each citation using each of the popular style guides. Also it gives advice about how to avoid plagiarism.
    
    
  • "Research Organizing/Citing Tools" page (accessible from the "Reference Shelf" option on the Libraries' home page).

return to top