Online Learners

How To Do Research

1. Pick a topic
2. Find sources and maybe use Zotero
3. Evaluate those sources
4. Write down what you discover
5. What not to do while writing papers

For more detailed assistance, look at our Library Research Guides.

The Online Writing Lab at Purdue also has many hints for writing research papers.

Off-Campus Access

You do not need to come to the library in person to use many of our resources. You can use these from anywhere you can access the Internet.

• Getting started: encyclopedias on your topic
• Books
• Specific topics: journal articles
• More than Google: Internet searching

For off-campus access to the Library's online resources, log in when prompted with your La Sierra University email login if you are a registered student, staff or faculty member. For the username, do not include the @lasierra.edu part of your email.

Once you have chosen a topic, you may wish to look at an encyclopedia to get a brief overview of your field of study. This will help with basic understanding of major topics, as well as showing you the words that professionals use when discussing this topic. This will make other searches much easier.

Our research guides for a particular subject will have a list of recommended encyclopedias for that subject in the “Encyclopedias and More” tab.

Some starting points:

• Gale Virtual Reference Library - more than 200 specialized encyclopedias dealing with a wide variety of topics
• Encyclopedia Britannica Online - a very helpful general source
• Wikipedia - while not a scholarly source, looking at the References list can yield some good references

eBooks

The Fritz Guy Library has a collection of eBooks that can be accessed anywhere with an internet connection. To find our eBooks, go to the main library website and click on the link that says "eBook Catalog".

Physical Books

Students who are currently enrolled in a distance learning class without an on-campus component can request a book from our library be physically mailed to them. Only books in the Fritz Guy Library’s Main Stacks collection are available through this service; in-library-use-only books cannot leave the library and are consequently not able to be mailed. Please check the online catalog to be sure the book you are requesting is available. Usual library policies regarding borrowing periods and fines apply. 

Journal articles, particularly from peer-reviewed journals, will be the majority of your online research.

Peer-reviewed journals, which are reviewed by other experts in the field before publication, and are usually published for experts in the field, will be extremely useful. Sometimes these are called "scholarly" articles. Most of our online databases will allow you to search only for peer-reviewed articles.

To find journal articles:

• Search for articles (organized by topic). You will need to log in and then select a database to search in.
• Full-text databases are identified by a FT next to the database name.
• A list of all our full-text journals is available; this is very useful for browsing tables of contents or finding a specific article if you already have a citation. Some databases may index a journal but not provide the full text of the articles in it. This will allow you to see if another database has the same article in full text.
• We may have the journal in print form here at the library. If you fill out this form, we'll see if we have it here.
• Finally, you can request a copy of an article by using our interlibrary loan service. We'll track down the article, from any library, and try to get a copy. You can use this form to make your request.

If you are behind a firewall (as you might be if you are working at a school) and cannot access the databases, you will need to contact your system administrator and make sure that port 2048 is open for our proxy server.

Internet resources are a popular and potentially very useful source of information for students.  Caution, however, is strongly advised when using Internet resources.  Remember that there is no quality control imposed on the Internet.  It is therefore up to you to determine whether a web site meets academic standards for scholarly, reliable information.  Following are some suggested resources for help in evaluating materials found on the internet: