Books, articles and resources beyond Vassar: 

• Interlibrary Loan (ILL)
  • Books, articles, film, dissertations and other resources not available at Vassar. ILLiad is our ILL platform.
• WorldCat
  • The "world's catalog"; a great resource for locating books.
• Purchase Request Form
  • Please complete for books/ebooks, films and more, especially if you plan to heavily rely on the item and would like to borrow the resource for a longer period of time.
• NY Library catalogs
  • Every college student in NY, regardless of your home state, can apply for a New York Public Library (NYPL) card. This allows you to access NYPL online resources and request to view items in person.
• Center for Research Libraries (CRL)
  • A large research collection that includes an international newspaper archive.
• HathiTrust
  • A great and free online repository for older materials, especially those within the public domain. 
• Internet Archive
  • A surprisingly good source for ebooks from the 1950's-early 2000's, radio shows/podcasts and other miscellaneous resources. Access may require free account creation. 
• Other institutional repositories (may be retrieved in Google Scholar)
  • Like Vassar's Digital Library, you may find resources housed in college and university institutional repositories that contain the scholarly output/publications of that community. 

Literature Synthesis Grids

Synthesis grids are organizational tools for recording the main concepts of your sources and can help with connecting your sources to one another.

• Synthesis Grid Templates & Search Log: This template provides four different organizational frameworks for keeping track of your sources. Select the grid that most closely meets your needs; add or delete columns as you wish. Download or create your own copy to begin using.
• UCLA Library Search Log
• UCLA Library Search Log Completed Example

Catalogue & Database Accounts

Vassar Library Search and many of our databases platforms (Ebsco, ProQuest, etc.) allow users to create free accounts where you can save searches and items from results lists. 

Zotero Citation Manager

Zotero is a free easy-to-use citation management tool to help you collect, store, organize, cite, and share your research sources. Zotero can format in-text citations and generate references lists using your preferred citation style. 

More information about citing and style guides on the Citing & Managing Sources. 

Trello

Trello is a free project management software. You can use it for setting deadlines, keeping track of tasks and more. See Organizing the research process using Trello to get started. There are free and paid versions; I use the free version almost daily. 

Google Keep

Somewhat similar to Trello, Google Keep is best used for visualizing tasks and creating checklists. 

Evernote

An platform for notes and electronic notebooks. Free and paid versions, both cloud-based and desktop versions. 

1. Don't try to keep it all in your head.
   1. Diagram your tentative topic/ research question (Kristin Luker's Bedraggled Daisy) 
   2. Document your research process; consider using a synthesis grid or a research log/journal to plan out your current tasks and next steps.
   3. Annotate your references documents. If possible, work this into your search process and note why the source is relevant and how you might use it, as you save them. If using Zotero, you can use its built-in annotation tools. 
2. When saving sources, look for permalinks or DOIs
3. Create accounts with the database platforms you are using regularly to save searches and results.
4. Use a citation manager. Zotero is a great and free option. 

Summary: Generative AI cannot replicate intellectual work and often provides great sounding fake citations, plus may have date restrictions (for example, the free version of Chat GPT's training data ends in 2021.) There are more reliable research tools (slide 12) that can compliment (but not replace) your research efforts.