Library Research Guidance

• Make sure you understand all of the requirements for your assignment.
  • How many sources are required?
  • What types of sources are required?
  • How many pages, PowerPoint slides, or images are needed in your completed assignment?
• Feeling nervous because you aren’t comfortable with your topic yet? That’s okay! Discovery is what school is all about!
  • Do some background searching. Check out Google, Wikipedia, Youtube, and even AI tools for summaries and inspiration! It’s an opportunity to ethically use AI to gain background information about your topic. However, always make sure to verify the accuracy of the information found in these popular mainstream sources.
  • Don’t be afraid to ask your instructor clarifying questions. They want you to be successful as well!
  • Once you have a general idea about your research topic, you will be much more comfortable taking in new information and generating your own ideas or arguments!

• Do NOT download a bunch of articles right away, without looking at them.
• Read the abstract (summary of the article) of the potentially useful article you discovered.
• If the article appears useful after reading the abstract, skim through its contents.
• If it still appears useful, congratulations! You have located a relevant source!

These steps can and will save you a lot of time down the road in your research journey.

Once you have tried a few different searches and selected relevant articles based on their abstracts, it is time to dive into the articles’ contents and evaluate their quality to see if they’re beneficial to your assignment!

Not all articles and websites are created equally. Each source you include in your research should be created by someone with authority on the subject, provide accurate information, and contribute positively to your own work. A helpful reminder is to ask yourself: am I being SMART in my research?

Information literacy is a survival skill in the ever-evolving Information Age. Instead of drowning in the abundance of information that floods their lives, information literate people know how to find, evaluate, and use information effectively to solve a particular problem or make a decision—whether the information they select comes from a computer, a book, a government agency, a film, or any number of other possible resources.

The American Library Association (ALA) has defined Information Literacy as, the skills required by individuals to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and effectively use information accurately and purposefully inside and outside the classroom.

Library, A. L. A. (2025, June 10). Evaluating Information: Information Literacy.
Libguides.ala.org. https://libguides.ala.org/InformationEvaluation/Infolit

• Information is all around us.
• We all need to be information literate in order to thrive in our information- saturated world, not just as students, but also as citizens in a democratic society
• We need to:
  • watch for credibility
  • cross check facts to ensure accuracy
  • be able to detect bias, manipulation, and hidden agendas

Search all books, eBooks, articles, videos, and more across all three campuses! It’s a great place to start to explore what types of sources may be most suitable for your research while also serving as well as a dive-in point to find more specific information.

A library database is an organized, searchable online collection of credible resources that requires a subscription for access. You can login to all of our databases automatically, using your MPTC login. Databases offer reliable, often full-text content, such as scholarly journal articles, newspapers, magazines, e-books, and videos you typically won’t find freely available on the open web.

A database allows you to search by keyword, phrase, title, subject, author, or publication to find the perfect source.

Using a database is also another way to make sure you are being SMART! By selecting the Peer Reviewed, Full Text, and Time Frame filters near your search box and evaluating articles, you can feel more confident in the accuracy and reliability of the articles you retrieve.

Depending on your assignment, it may be okay to use information from nonacademic sources including news outlets, trade journals, webpages, and social media, among others. The important thing is that you evaluate every source of information with the same SMART criteria, whether it is a scholarly journal article or someone’s YouTube channel.

Our library can find materials, including books and online articles, from other libraries. Simply request the item you need through our Interlibrary Loan Librarian if you cannot find a specific item through our catalog and database links.

Creating proper citations means:

• Anyone can verify your work for accuracy.
• You are a thoughtful writer who can objectively demonstrate what you have learned.
• You’re protected from plagiarism.

Don’t wait until the last minute to write your reference page! It’s much easier to create your citation at the same time you locate that perfect source, because:

• It makes it easier to reference the source again, if needed.
• It means you will have a guide available for your in-text citations.
• As you wrap up your research, the reference page will be nearly finished, saving you the hassle of going back to locate source information again.

You should always have reference page at the end of your work, with complete citations for each source arranged in alphabetical order.

No matter what type of source you’re citing, you will almost always have these parts:

Who : the Author
When : the Date
What : the Title
Where : the Publisher

An example of a book citation in APA format would look like this:

Markel, H. (2004). When Germs Travel. Pantheon Books.

An example of an APA citation of an article would look like this:

Stine, Z., Broughton, T., Andrews, G., & Spromberg, C. (2022). Responses to Shame: Influences of Adherence to Masculinity Norms. Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research, 27(4), 268–275.

An in-text citation is required any time you:

• state a fact that isn’t considered common knowledge
• directly quote someone else’s words
• paraphrase (restate) an idea from another author in your own words
• summarize a source’s content in your own words.

An in-text citation will often include an author’s last name, publication year, and page number. Example:

• Dogs are the best pets because “studies show that dogs reduce stress and are loyal pets to their owners” (Smith, 2019, p.10).

Keep in mind, the content of in-text citations may vary depending on the type of source and information available.