Miller library and the librarians within are always ready to help you develop your research skills and tackle specific problems or scholarly questions you may encounter during your time at Cornerstone. You can visit us in-person, reach out through email, use our webchat function, or even text to get help with your projects. 

You can also reference the following guides and pages to help illuminate your research efforts. 

Step 1: Define your topic. Narrow or broaden as necessary.

When you sit down to start researching for a paper or project, it's important to consider questions like the following:

• What keywords or combinations of keywords best describe your topic?
• What type of information are you looking for? (e.g. news articles, reference works, recent research papers, books...)
• Are peer-reviewed sources necessary to include in your particular paper/project (usually, yes!)?
• What details or facets of your topic might be the most interesting, insightful, or valuable?
   

Once you have a rough idea of what you'd like to investigate, you may need to narrow or broaden your concept's scope, like so:

Example Topic: "Is screen-time related to poor academic performance?"

Example of Narrowing: "Does consumption of short-form video content influence focus and concentration in college-aged students?"

Example of Broadening: "How does media consumption influence brain function?"

In this example, you would want to narrow your search, so that your research is more tightly focused, while also exploring the broader topic as it may provide valuable context and supporting information.

Step 2: Identify terms and keep a running list of new words you find.

If you are unfamiliar with the topic, start by researching dictionaries, encyclopedias, magazines, or news articles for background and for terminology that will be important for article or book searches later on:

1. Library.cornerstone.edu > search words in Library search box > Limit Content to Reference

2. Wikipedia.com (though Wikipedia should not be trusted for authoritative information, it is useful for introductory knowledge on a topic)

Note that AI tools, like ChatGPT, are able to condense a huge amount of information for surface-level digestion very quickly. However, they are notoriously and sometimes tragically untrustworthy, prone to fabrication and censorship, and not geared for in-depth investigations or scholarship. Copying from AI tools without attribution is considered a form of plagiarism in violation of Cornerstone University's Academic Integrity Policy. 

Examples of key terms from the scenario above:

• "short-form video" (use quotes to search for exact phrase)
• "short-form content"
• TikTok / YouTube shorts / etc.
• teen, teens, teenagers, college students, young adults, adolescents 

Step 3: Determine where to search for good information.

1. Miller Library: Miller Library offers academic electronic and print resources, including books and scholarly journals.
2. Google: Good for finding websites, blogs, popular periodicals (newspapers and magazines), video or video excerpts, book excerpts, and citation information 
3. Google Scholar: Good for broad searches of academic information with access often available from Miller Library resources or ILL requests

Miller Library will generally be the best resource for your academic research!

Step 4: Advanced Keyword Searching

Summon is a powerful search tool able to produce results from both the physical and electronic resources available to Cornerstone University students. Strategies to make the most of Summon's abilities include:

Advanced Seaches

Using the advanced search function, you can choose to search for specific fields including: Title, Subject Terms, Author, Publisher, Publication Title, Volume, Issue, Language, Notes, ISBN, ISSN, DOI, DEWEY

Phrase Searching

If you want to search for keywords that only occur together in a set order, you can use quotations around your search terms (e.g. "wild dogs")

Combining Keywords (Boolean Operators)

Summon allows you to search among multiple keywords using the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT. These operators must be written in ALL CAPS.

• AND is the default operator and pulls sources that include both/all keywords (dogs AND wolves)
• OR expands the search results to any results with either/all keywords (dogs OR wolves)
• NOT eliminates results for the first keywords that contain the indicated keyword (e.g. dogs AND wild NOT pets)

Boolean searching also works with phrase searching (e.g. "wild dogs AND wolves").

Wildcards (? and *)

Searching with the question mark symbol (?) tells the system to search for words with any variation of that character. For instance:

• Ols?n would produce results for Olsen and Olson (among others)

Searching with the asterisk (*) will find results with words matching 0 or more characters within a word or at the end of a word. For instance:

• Ch*ter would produce results for Charter, Character, Chapter, etc. 
• Temp* would produce results for Temptation, Temple, Temporary, etc.

Step 5: Evaluate the relevance and quality of the information found.

Currency – When was the material published?

Relevance – Does the information relate to your topic?

Authority – Is it in agreement with the Bible? Are the authors and publishers credible sources?

Accuracy – Does it agree with other findings on the subject? Do they use other sources and research?

Purpose – Who is it written for? Why was this written? Do the authors/publishers have unfair biases?