Find Good Research, Free

image source: FindIcons 

I recently spoke to Daniel Kreiss' JOMC 244 class: Talk Politics: An Introduction to Political Communication, and I created this library resource guide for further research.  I wrote this post for the class tumblr (talkingpolitics.tumblr.com) and am reposting it here.

My presentation had two goals:

1. Show researchers how to improve search terms to generate more relevant
2. Show researchers how to access free resources for finding scholarly & newspaper articles. 

I'd like to highlight some of the tips and resources I shared in class in the hopes that they will be useful to those seeking to incorporate research into their reporting.

Search tips: Generating Good Search Terms (any resource)

1. Start with your concept -- such as negative advertising
2. Too many results? Put "quotes" around the phrase to require it be searched as a phrase: "negative advertising"
3. Add another term or two to your search, to make the results more precise:  "negative advertising" AND campaign AND politics

Search tips: More Precise Results (library search engines; won't work in Google)

1. If you're searching a library database / search engine, limit the content type to scholarly articles or newspaper articles
2. To expand your results, but keep them relevant, try the wildcard operator, *: "negative advertis*"  AND campaign* AND politic*, which will search for
• negative advertising; negative advertisements; negative advertisement
• campaign; campaigning; campaigns
• politics; political; politician; politicians
3. To expand results further, while still keeping them relevant, use synonyms for one search term:
• "negative advertis*"  AND (campaign* OR election*) AND politics

Free Search Resources 

Most states in the United States offer multiple free search engines to residents with a library card. I'll focus here on resources for North Carolina residents, but this model exists all over the U.S.!

NC Live offers hundreds of free, full-text resources to North Carolina residents with a library card. Check out this list of search engines to help you find free journals and newspaper articles!  

• Academic Search Complete is incredibly useful for scholarly articles, though it also includes newspaper and trade publications. The full-text of many of these articles identified will be available for free; if not, ask your library to get the articles for you (free! via "Interlibrary Loan" magic).
• Newspaper Source Plus has full-text from hundreds of U.S. newspapers, including over 50 from N.C. as well as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

All you need to access these is a free North Carolina library card.

Note: while these resources are "free-to-you," they cost the State Library millions of dollars. Please use them!

You may wonder about Google Scholar, which is Google's way of finding scholarly articles.  I have mixed feelings about Google Scholar, which I have documented in a blog post.  As long as you know what it does and doesn't have, it's fine to use. But if you need the full-text of an article that's not in Google Scholar, please ask a librarian!

image from IconArchive

Which brings me to my last point: Ask a Librarian!  Many news organizations have an on-site library, including CNN, the New York Times, and NPR -- if you are lucky enough to work at one of them, please make use of your library resources! Luckily, all you need is a public library card to contact a librarian at your public library for research help. They are happy to help all residents, including journalists.  Public universities are also equipped to help members of the public, including journalists.  

If you spend a little time up front learning what library resources are available in your community, it will save you lots of time later AND will help you find more relevant material to write about.

Updates

In which we revisit some earlier posts and see what's new. This is partly because now that classes are over, I have time to catch up on old issues of the New Yorker and New Scientist, leading to some blog bits.

Crows
Last July, I wrote about the intelligence of crows and scrub-jays. In March, "hacker and writer" Joshua Klein spoke at TedTalks about crows and how he taught them to use a specially-created crow vending machine.


As Klein leads up to the vending machine (truly amazing), he shows some fascinating videos which nicely illustrate how crows learn, specifically a shot of a crow bending a wire to pick up food in a lab, and another shot of a crow using cars to crack her nuts -- then waiting for the light to change so she can collect the nut bits in safety. I won't spoil the vending machine story for you, as it's really fascinating.

Politics, Emotion, and ... Genes?
I've written occasionally about politics and the brain, and I read an article in an early February issue of New Scientist about some studies that suggest "political positions are substantially determined by biology." Jim Giles summarizes recent studies in various journals, and the findings are startling: twin studies suggest that political orientation is genetic (American Political Science Review, 2005); there may be a connection between fear of death, art preference, and one's political leaning (American Psychologist, 2003), and "there is probably a set of genes that influences openness, which in turn may influence political orientation" (Journal of Research in Personality, YEAR). Giles cautions, however, that "there is no shortage of critics who question the whole idea of linking politics with biology." For more, check out the article, or read some of the articles that Giles summarizes.

The Pirahã
I summarized a New Yorker article about the Pirahã about a year ago; in January, New Scientist interviewed the linguist Daniel Everett, who, along with his family, are the only non-Pirahã who speak that language. If you're interested in the story of the language of the Pirahã, and what it says for language acquisition (including a conflict with Noam Chomsky), the interview is a good read.

For More Information

• Klein, Joshua. The Amazing Intelligence of Crows. TedTalks, March 2008.
  
• Giles, Jim. "Born That Way." New Scientist, Feb. 2, 2008. Not available for free online, but full-text may be available @your library, in Academic Search Premier and other databases.
  
• Alford, John, Carolyn Funk, and John R. Hibbing. Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted? (pdf) American Political Science Review. Vol. 99(2), May 2005, 153-167.
  
• Jost, John T. The End of the End of Ideology (abstract). American Psychologist. Vol 61(7), Oct 2006, 651-670. Full-text may be available @ your library in PsycARTICLES.
• "Heritabilities of Common and Measure-Specific Components of the Big Five Personality Factors" Journal of Research in Personality, vol 32 (4), April 1998, p. 431. Not available for free online, but full-text may be available @your library, in ScienceDirect.
• Else, Liz and Lucy Middleton. "Interview: Daniel Everett." New Scientist Jan 19, 2008, p42-45. Subtitle: "Out on a limb over language: linguist Daniel Everett went to Brazil as a young Christian missionary to work with the Piraha indigenous people. Instead of converting them, he told Liz Else and Lucy Middleton, he lost his faith and his family, and provoked a major intellectual row." Not available for free online, but full-text may be available @ your library, in Academic OneFile.

Database of Political Ads

There's a cool database of political ads online at http://projects.washingtonpost.com/politicalads/

The Washington Post has collected (links to) over 500 ads in the database, and this is the description of the resources:

The database includes political advertisements funded by campaigns, parties, committees, and independent advocacy groups. Most of the ads are tied to specific U.S. House, U.S. Senate, or gubernatorial races throughout the country. Some of the ads are more general "issue" or advocacy ads not tied to a particular race or candidate. You can search for ads based on the criteria listed below.

They are categorized by campaign, person, content, tone, characters, etc. Some of you may be especially interested in this group of emotional ads.

It's a nice idea in theory, but of the 5 ads I tried to watch, only 2 worked. Still, if you're interested in politics & communication, you might want to check this out.

Science Political

Heard a good interview on last week's ScienceFriday about science & the presidential elections. In The Call for A Science Debate, Ira talks to Shawn Lawrence Otto, the organizer of Science Debate 2008 about Otto's effort to generate a presidential debate about science. Here's what ScienceDebate says about itself:

"Science Debate 2008 is a grassroots initiative spearheaded by a growing number of scientists and other concerned citizens. The signatories to our "Call for a Presidential Debate on Science & Technology" include Nobel laureates and other leading scientists, presidents of universities, congresspersons of both major political parties, business leaders, religious leaders, former presidential science advisors, the editors of America's major science journals, writers, and the current and several past presidents of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, among many others."

Otto especially wants folks to sign their online petition to support their efforts (see who else has signed ... it's a pretty impressive list ...). They're also interested in possible questions for the candidates. Here's what I said:

One question I'd have for the candidates is how would they improve science education? It's important to have more scientists (especially women and under-represented "minorities"), but as a lay person interested in science, I think it's also important to have more people interested in science generally. How would candidates ensure that happens?

Bora Zivkovic of A Blog Around the Clock has been writing about this for a while, (see his posts tagged politics), including a six-part series on questions he'd ask the candidates (his preface: "To keep the conversation about the Science Debate 2008 going, I decided to post, one per day, my ideas for potential questions to be asked at such a debate.")

I usually try to stay away from politics in my public life, but this seems like an important issue for science lovers (scientists and lay folks alike) to consider when planning a vote.

For More Information

• The Call for A Science Debate, ScienceFriday, January 11th, 2008.
• ScienceDebate2008.com
  

Politics & the Brain

Some interesting news / articles lately about the political brain. Here are some tidbits, in the order in which I heard them:

• This week's All in the Mind covered the political brain: "As Australians stand in front of the cardboard voting booth next week what's going on in our minds? In choosing the future direction of the nation -- do we weigh up policies and promises with a rational mind, or are we emoting with our pencils? And new research has sent the left and right of the scientific community on a political bender with the idea that we're neurologically wired to support our team. All in the Mind probes your political brain." All in the Mind also provides a nice set of citations to articles by scientists featured in the show, including Drew Weston's recent book: The Political Brain: the Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.
• This week's Science Friday also covered the political brain: "What happens in your brain when you think about politics? We'll talk with a researcher using brain imaging techniques to map out voters' innermost feelings about the current crop of candidates. The researchers used fMRI imaging to examine brain activity in 20 'likely voters' as they looked at pictures of the candidates and watched clips from speeches. But can maps of activity in the amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex, or insula really translate into action in the polling booth?"
• The Science Friday article was influenced by a New York Times op-ed piece last week entitled This Is Your Brain on Politics in which Marco Iacoboni, Joshua Freedman, Jonas Kaplan, and others report on their fMRI work on political decision making by swing voters.

All of the studies reported here have their supporters & their critics.
For More Info

• The Political Brain, All in the Mind, November 17, 2007.
• Politics & the Brain, Science Friday, November 16, 2007.
  
• Iacoboni, Marco, Joshua Freedman, Jonas Kaplan, et al. This Is Your Brain on Politics :[Op-Ed]. New York Times, November 11, 2007. p. 14.
  
• Politics & the Brain, a response: Letter to the Editor, New York Times, November 14, 2007.
  
• Kaplan, J., Freedman, J., & Iacoboni, M. (2007). "Us versus Them: Political Attitudes and Party Affiliation Influence Neural Response to Faces of Presidential Candidates." Neuropsychologia, 45(1), 55-64. (available @ your library)
  
• Weston, Drew (2007) The Political Brain: the Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. New York: PublicAffairs.

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Relationships between Language & Culture?!

Apparently it's still linguistics week here at the CogSciLibrarian corral. In catching up on my New Yorker reading, I came across a recent New Yorker article about the Brazilian hunter-gatherer tribe called the Pirahã (pronounced pee-da-HAN). John Colapinto accompanied linguist Dan Everett on a recent visit to learn more about the Pirahã's language, including its lack of words for color and numbers, as well as its lack of "recursion." (Recursion is the human ability to say not only "the librarian is reading a book," but also "the librarian who is wearing a tiara is reading a book")

According to Colapinto, Everett has been writing about the Pirahã for over 25 years, "[b]ut his work remained relatively obscure until early in 2005, when he posted on his Web site an article titled 'Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,' which was published that fall in the journal Cultural Anthropology." In the article, Everett notes that the Pirahã don't have words for quantification (all, each, most, few), and don't do recursion. The controversy stems from Noam Chomsky's recent revision to his theory of universal grammar, which posits that "recursion is the cornerstone of all languages."

Yipes! Right into the linguistics fray.

The article is a good introduction both into the language issues in play with the Pirahã, (which Brent Berlin, a cognitive anthropologist at the University of Georgia, believes "... may provide a snapshot of language at an earlier stage of syntactic development. ... 'The plausible scenarios ... suggest that early language looks something like the kind of thing that Pirahã looks like now.' ") -- and also a diversion into Peter Gordon's 2004 Science article "Numerical Cognition Without Words," in which he describes the Pirahã's understanding of numbers (very short version: one, two, many).

Colapinto neatly summarizes some of the arguments going on in linguistics right now about Chomsky's theory of universal grammar, including that Chomsky has not studied language development among many different peoples, and that Chomsky is not much interested in the evolution of human language. Everett's article and research may provide a window into the development of our language; at a minimum, it calls into question Chomsky's theory that recursion is essential in human language.

If you're interested in either language development or the politics of linguistics, this is a good read.

To Learn More
Colapinto, John, The Interpreter; Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language? The New Yorker. 4/16/07, 120+. Full-text also available from LexisNexis, Academic Search Premier, and Academic OneFile @ your library.

Everett, Dan. "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã // Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language." (abstract; pdf) Current Anthropology, 46:4 (2005), pp 621+.

Gordon, Peter. Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence from Amazonia. Science, 06:5695 (2004) pp. 496 - 499. Full-text may be available @ your library.

New Books, Jan 21

Arab mass media : newspapers, radio, and television in Arab politics; by Rugh, William A.. publisher: Praeger, 2004. for more info.

Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking; by Malcolm Gladwell. publisher: Little, Brown, 2005. for more info.

Do You Speak American?; by Robert MacNeil, William Cran. publisher: Doubleday, 2004. for more info.

Event-Related Potentials : A Methods Handbook (A Bradford Book); by Todd C. Handy (Editor). publisher: MIT, 2004. for more info.

On Intelligence; by Jeff Hawkins / Sandra Blakeslee. publisher: NY Times, 2004. for more info.

The Cognitive Neurosciences III : Third Edition; by Michael S. Gazzaniga (Editor). publisher: MIT, 2004. for more info.

The Great Brain Debate:Is It Nature or Nurture?; by John E. Dowling. publisher: National Academies Press, 2004. for more info.