Discovering reliable academic sources… by Pablo the Penguin

I’ve been taking my research much more seriously lately. It’s time I made some progress – I can’t let Pip keep rampaging through the Library like this for much longer, it’s far too distracting for the poor students!

After the trouble I had with Google, I decided I should try the Discovery search on the Library website. It searches across lots of academic databases, so is a good place to find reliable material. I wouldn’t say that Lovecraft report I found in the Book Nook was unreliable, but… well, OK, maybe it was.

Discovery needs a bit of practice to get the very best out of it, so I spoke to the librarians at the enquiry desk. They were very helpful and gave me some pointers which reduced my results from hundreds of thousands to a more manageable list. There was no way I’d have had time to read all the articles I originally found, so this was a relief! Using “filters” they made my search more relevant and gave me a much better list to work with. They also gave me a useful introduction to Google Scholar, where I found this:

Gigantism in fossil and living penguins

It’s an article from an open access “institutional repository”. I hadn’t realised these existed before, but they sound like great places to look for academic research which other people have done, and which they’ll let you read for free. UoP has one here: https://researchportal.port.ac.uk/portal

I know not everyone can spend as much time in the Library as I do, so it’s important to say that getting help from the librarians is available remotely as well as in person. You can chat to them online, phone them, or send them an email. You can even book a one-to-one appointment if you need a bit of extra help with research for a project or dissertation. All these options are described on this web page, and come highly recommended by me.

I’m off to my book basket to read all the new things I’ve found. See you soon.