Graduate Student Library Guide

​Citation Trace (search past articles cited by a source) 

1. Find one VERY RELEVANT ARTICLE or BOOK
2. Look through its bibliography
3. Find other VERY RELEVANT ARTICLES or BOOKS
4. If the source is a book, copy the title and search for it in the library catalog.  If the source is an article, open the Journal Finder and copy the information from the citation into the form to search for it.

​​Finding out more about a journal

Use Ulrich's Periodical Directory to determine:

1. The peer-reviewed status of a journal
2. Access points of a journal
3. Peer-reviewed journals within a subject area

The Graduate Theses collection collection works to gather and disseminate selected theses of Concordia College graduate students. The collection spans a wide array of topics from students completing their degree in the Teaching and Learning Masters Program, the Music Education Masters Program, and the Masters of Education in World Languages program. Currently, the majority of theses cover theses related to the education of world languages and the issues facing classrooms and teachers in that field, as that program has a long history at the college. The collection continues to grow in variety and scope as more students graduate from the Masters programs at Concordia. The collection contains both theses and capstone projects, so there will be some variation in how they are formatted. Not all theses have been digitized.

If you are in the F-M area and would like to browse print copies of Masters theses, please make an appointment with the Archives. ​To make an appointment, please contact Allison Bundy, archives associate, at abundy@cord.edu or by calling the archives at 218-299-3241.

As a graduate student, you will have the opportunity to have your approved thesis added to this collection. Upon completing the thesis process, please submit a PDF of your thesis to the Director of Graduate Education, Dr. Cassandra Glynn, cglynn@cord.edu. Dr. Glynn will arrange the publication of your thesis in the Concordia Archives. For questions about formatting and access to your thesis once it is added to the collection, please contact Archivist Allison Bundy at abundy@cord.edu or by calling the archives at 218-299-3241.

For those books, articles, and resources that you find "in the wild" (via footnotes, a professor's recommendation, references in another resource), you may need to use the manual form for Inter-library Loan.  Be aware that extremely remote, fragile, or rare items will not be available for inter-library loan. Often, E-Books from other libraries are not available using Inter-library loan due to contractual agreements (contact your librarian to see if we can find a print copy of the book to ILL).

Tips:

• Gather as much citation information as you can about the resource (specific page numbers from an anthology or a journal are especially helpful)
• Do not set the calendar for the time you need the item too close to the present moment, because the system may kick out the request if it seems impossible to fulfill.   Set it at least 7 days out from the time of the request.  Your article or book will still be sent as quickly as possible.

Manual Form for Inter-library Loan Requests

Search strategies and information management will pay off for big projects. Here are some tips for both:

• Develop a plan
  • You will need to plan ahead; outlining your search strategy will make you feel more in control of the process
  • As soon as you have a research idea/research question, gather sources
• Getting sources
  • Check out print books related to your topic asap
  • A librarian work-around for partial citations (when you may have missed required data for the citation): put the title and the author into the library’s Advanced Search, find the correct book, click on the title, and look at the full description of the book – you will usually have enough citation information for the bibliography page.  You will still need to keep track of all individual pages from which you have gathered information, data, charts, etc. to use in footnotes or in-text citations.
• Keep a Research Log – keep track of terms used, databases/books consulted, dead-ends, on-going questions you have about your topic leads
• Get in touch with your librarian if you have trouble accessing sources, need additional sources, and when you need to cite sources

Cross-disciplinary Searching Tips:

• Keep a list of keywords/Subject Headings, especially for the most relevant articles & books
• Use Subject Term searching if the database offers it, but do keyword searching as a separate set of searches (especially for contemporary topics)
• Learn how different databases refer to similar concepts, to institutions, to authors, etc.
• Use encyclopedias and themed dictionaries to build your search vocabulary
• Note the way terms are used by scholars (take notes in class)
• If an “author-submitted abstract” search option is available, use it
• Use an author’s name as a search in a database to find other articles by that person (especially helpful if you get stuck in your search – but be wary of only using one scholar’s perspective)
• Use “Smart-Text Searching” wisely (this will have the same pros and cons as an ordinary Google search)
• Keep a Research Log/maintain a Research Space – for all of your citations, pdfs, links, notes, outlines, etc.
  • You can do this old-school with a notebook
  • Options that might work digitally are:
    • JSTOR’s Work Space (use your Cobber username & password to create an account)
    • Google Suite of tools
    • MS Teams if you like to use Word (be aware that both Google and MS Teams may alter your formatting as you move from offline to online editing)

Here are some printable templates that may prove useful at different stages of your project: