Marty Bourgeois wrote:
> Those of you who assign research papers: What do you do if you are
> at an institution that has a poor library, which causes students to
> have difficulty finding sources? Interlibrary loan services
> typically take too long if a paper is to be completed during the
> same semester it is assigned.
Here's an idea. I've started using the search engine at
http://www.northernlight.com which I find particularly effective for
scholarly stuff. One of its attractions is that it digs up sources not
only on the net but from its private collection. This includes
unpublished documents and also material from a variety of
publications, including quite a few scholarly ones.
As a test, I searched using the words "children" and "aggression", a
typical student term-paper search. In addition to some promising web
sites, it turned up papers from the following scholarly sources:
Annual Review of Psychology
Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology
Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing
Journal of Genetic Psychology
Phi Delta Kappan (whoops--I hope that one's scholarly)
Here's the interesting part. For a fee deducted from your credit card,
they will give you immediate on-line access to the article. For the
ones I've listed, the cost in each case was $2.95. That's not too bad,
given that at our university, an interlibrary loan costs $2.00 per
item (in Canadian funny money, of course), and even to photocopy an
item in the library costs something.
They also give you something like $5.00 free at the start. I just used
it to purchase a summary of some government documents, and it worked
perfectly. If your students have functioning credit cards, this might
be a useful way for them to get good papers fast.
-Stephen
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Stephen Black, Ph.D. tel: (819) 822-9600 ext 2470
Department of Psychology fax: (819) 822-9661
Bishop's University e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Lennoxville, QC
J1M 1Z7
Canada Department web page at http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy
Check out TIPS listserv for teachers of psychology at:
http://www.frostburg.edu/dept/psyc/southerly/tips/
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