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Media Psychology & Society

This Guide includes resources relevant to the Research and Application Assignment #2 of Prof. Raney's Class in Spring 2021

Google Scholar Search

Tip:

  • To have the "Find it @ FSU" link on the Google Scholar results, change your Google Scholar setting. 
    • Click on the three horizontal bars on the upper left hand > Settings> Library links> Type on Florida State University to the search box> select the FSU> Save. 
    • When you see other links along with the "Find it@FSU" link for the same entry, always choose the Find it @ FSU link. This will help cite the sources correctly. 
  • When there are too many results, or if you are interested in the recent works only, change the date range by clicking on the "Custom Range..." link.  Enter the years, such as 2015 and 2021. 
  • Develop a query that works
    • The order of search terms matters. Put the most important keyword in the query first. 
    • Start nice and broad by entering the most important keywords, then exam the search results carefully. Add or revise the search terms as you go. 
    • Use quotation marks for a phrase searching
      • "media addiction"  "social media"
    • Use the Boolean Operator OR in uppercases to connect similar terms.
      • children OR youth OR pediatric OR kids 
      • "young adults" OR teens OR adolescents 
    • Use a parenthesis (  ) for nesting the similar terms  
      • ("digital addiction" OR "media addiction")
    • Use * to handle word variations 
      • adolescent* will retrieve adolescent, adolescents
      • (teen* OR "young adults" OR adolescen* OR "Gen Z" OR "Generation Z") 
    • Once the search results look relevant, drill down further by adding other keywords to the query
      • "social media" addiction
        • "social media" addiction (experiment OR hypothesis)
  • Click on the "Cited by" link to see other works that cited the source. 
    • Higher numbers indicate the popularity of the source 
    • If it is a relatively new publication, the "cited by" number might be lower.  
  • Click on the "Related Studies" link or "Cited By" link to find similar studies 

Databases

Tip:

  • Databases are a lot more powerful than Google Scholar for refining the search and retrieving peer-reviewed journal articles. 
  • Use "Advanced Search"
  • Create a query using the tricks for advanced online searching described in the Google Scholar Search box.  
  • On the results page's left panel, refine your search by source type (Scholarly Journals), date (2015-2021, for example), and peer-reviewed.
  • You can also sort the results by date so that the newest publication comes up first on the search results page. 
  • For the assignment, copy the article title > go to Google Scholar > paste the article title> run the search. Then record the "cited by" number of the article. 
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