Childhood and Youth Studies: Honours research students

Pîjashig Kwe kwe! Tunngahugit! She:kon! Aanii! Boozhoo! Tansi! Taanishi! Hello! Bienvenue!
The MacOdrum Library is located on the unceded territories of the Algonquin nation. This guide is designed for honours research students in Child Studies.

Manage your research

Citation management and reference rot

Use online tools to manage your sources (e.g., save citations, pdfs and create bibliographies).
- We offer citation management clinics throughout the year to introduce you to tools such as Zotero and Mendeley
Start a Perma.cc account to create permanent links for online sources (avoid reference rot!).

Identify a research problem

Use this worksheet to brainstorm research problems and key concepts in order to build search strategies.

You can find a number of writing guides in the library. Here is a sample:

Create a reading list

Two strategies for finding academic literature

Citation chaining
Search databases, journals and the library catalogue

Citation chaining
This is the process of using one good information source, such as an article relevant to your topic, as a starting point for finding additional relevant research. You can citation chain forwards and backwards:

Forward chaining
- Start with one work, the "seed document," and look at the works that have cited this document.
- Continue following forward the works that have cited those documents.
Backward chaining
- Look at the documents cited by a seed document and then follow those backward to the documents they cite.
  Databases

Use the Child Studies quick and detailed guides for finding databases and other resources.
Scopus and Google Scholar provided links to works that cite a particular publication
JSTOR text analyzer: Upload your own text or document into JSTOR and Text Analyzer will process the text to find the most significant topics and then recommends similar content on JSTOR.

Open Access journals

Recommended peer-review journals in our library collection

Peer-reviewed journals related to child development and psychology

Canadian Journal of Children's Rights (Landon Pearson Resource Centre)
Developmental Science
Developmental Neuropsychology
Child Development
Developmental Psychology
Psychological Science
Nature
Science

Some publications are available either only in print or online. Others are available in both formats. Check Ulrich'sWeb for more information about individual journals.

Find grey literature

Grey literature is an important source of information in arts and social science research that:

adds a valuable global perspective
provides detailed overviews on specific populations
may be only source of local information

Grey literature is defined as "information produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in electronic and print formats not controlled by commercial publishing" ie. where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body." ICGL Luxembourg definition, 1997. Expanded in New York, 2004

Types of grey literature