LibAnswers

The first step to gathering sources for your project is, naturally, to find sources. One of the best places to find this information would be to use Lanier Technical College's A-Z Database list. For the purposes of this tutorial, the "Academic Search Complete" database will be used. It is the second database listed on the A-Z Database page.

A-Z Database List
Alphabetical list of Lanier Technical College Library's databases

"Academic Search Complete" is a collection of multiple different databases ran by EBSCOhost and as such has a large amount of academic sources available for use. When you open the link to "Academic Search Complete", you will be given a variety of options for searching for sources.

First, at the top of the page, you will have options that allow you to make very specific searches for sources.

Under "Select a Field" next to each search field, you can specify what type of information you're searching for. Many of these are incredibly specific and won't be necessary for the vast majority of people, however, some of these are important to consider. For instance, if you're trying to find the work of a particular author, choosing the "AU Author" option would make the most sense. As would selecting "TI Title" if you were looking for an article that had a particular title. Or selecting "SO Journal Name" if you are trying to find sources from a particular academic journal.

It is also important to note that "And", "Or", and "Not" options are available for the second and third fields. This allows you to include or exclude results as you search for multiple things at once. You could, for example, perform the search below:

This would give you results that are about geology and the pacific northwest but exclude results that are talking about the state of Oregon.

Below the search area, there are even more specific options available. Not all of them are worth discussing in detail, but some are valuable to know.

Selecting "Scholarly Journals (Peer Reviewed)" will limit your results to academic journal articles.

It is likely you may run into circumstances where only an abstract or a small portion of a source is available. To avoid including these results, you can select either "Full Text Available Online" or "PDF Full Text".

As for using PowerNotes to gather sources, you will first want to make sure that PowerNotes is activated in your browser. An explanation of how to do this is shown at the beginning of the previous section, "Project Outline".

Gathering quotations and citing sources is very streamlined within PowerNotes. Simply use your mouse to highlight the text you would like to save, and a window for your project within PowerNotes will open up. Click the topic you want to save a quotation to.

After selecting the topic, you will be prompted to add any notes you would like to add to go along with your quote. This could be used to add context you need to remember, your thoughts and feelings about what you've read, or even leave a note for yourself on how to use this quote later when you write your paper. Click the green check mark when you are finished.

This should work with both PDF and HTML documents, however, PDF documents will need to be loaded in your internet browser. If a PDF document does not work with PowerNotes, it may be because the PDF is lacking OCR functionality.

If the PDF is lacking OCR functionality, PowerNotes will display an error message like the one shown to the left. Click "Process PDF" to add in OCR functionality.

After processing, the red error message will change to green. Click "Download PDF" and open in your internet browser with PowerNotes equipped. The PDF should now be usable.

The quotation will be added under the topic you selected in the PowerNotes sidebar. Click the "Confirm citation" button in the lower left corner of the quotation box. This will allow you to confirm the details of the citation so that way you do not have to do this when you make your works cited or references page at the end of writing your paper, saving you quite a bit of time.

This is not universally the case, but because the source in question was taken from Academic Search Complete, PowerNotes already has the citation information pre-formatted from EBSCOhost itself.

If the citation is not automatically generated, it is possible to fill out the information manually. Note you can also change the format to whichever citation style is required for your class.

If the information is not automatically generated, and you require a DOI for an academic source, generally one can be located on the information page for a source.

Clicking "Source Notes" on the top right will allow you to add in notes if you did not already or if you need to make alterations.

If you want to add in notes that are not attached to a particular source, you can do so by using "Project Comments" as described in the "Project Outline" page, or you can use Freeform Notes.

Click this option to add in a Freeform note. It will be added to the topic that it is created under.

It will provide you a space to enter in the text for your note (shown below).

Click the three dots to the right to delete the note, move it to a new topic, or copy the note to another project.

If you feel that you may need to repeatedly return to a single source, or if you feel that you may want to use a source but aren't certain if you would like to cite it just yet, you can use bookmarks to save the page the source is on to make it easier to return to later. You can find the "Add Bookmark" option at the bottom of the header in the PowerNotes sidebar.

Citing a non-academic source, like the website shown above, is shown below.

Here, some text has been selected, as it was in the academic source example shown earlier in the section.

Here (above) is the quotation in the side panel. Click on the quotation symbol in the bottom left corner to "Confirm Citation". This will bring up a new page in the side panel.

Much of the information presented here will be generated by default by PowerNotes as it scans the page for the required information to generate a citation. Clicking the format drop down will allow you to change the citation style to the one required by your class. Click "Detailed Citation Information" at the bottom of the page.

Under the "Detailed Citation Information" section, you can see what information PowerNotes has used to generate the citation, and change any of it if it is incorrect. If you wish to manually create your citations, you can do this in the regular "Citation Information" section by typing in the "Citation" box.