Hi, I'm Krista Knapp, your friendly reference/instructional librarian, and I'm here to help you!
You can email me at kmknapp@salisbury.edu or kristaknapp@gmail.com. Trust me, you WANT to be friends with a librarian. Not only are we extraordinarily cool, but we're here to help you with your research, and we actually enjoy doing it, as crazy as that sounds! Visit my website for more information about me: http://faculty.salisbury.edu/~kmknapp/

When I'm not teaching classes or rushing off to meetings, you can find me in my office in Blackwell Library 129 or at the research services desk. My hours on the desk are Mondays 10am-12pm, Tuesdays 6pm-10pm, Wednesdays 12pm-2pm, Thursdays 10am-12pm, and Fridays 8am-10am. Stop by and say hi!

You can also get help 24 hours a day/7 days a week through the Maryland AskUsNow chat reference service: http://askusnow.info/

Finding articles:

Ask yourself if you need scholarly sources or popular sources for your assignment. Many times, your professor will insist on scholarly sources. What does that mean? Find out using this handy-dandy chart from Duke Libraries.

We have several databases you can use to search for journal, magazine, or newspaper articles. Some of them only give a citation to the article, and some have the full-text. Here is a list of databases you might want to try. WARNING: these links will only work from on campus. From off campus, access databases through Research Port.

ComAbstracts - citations to literature from professional communications literature. Now with Find It buttons thanks to your ever-vigilant Communications liaision (ME!)
Humanities International Complete - an EBSCO database with some fulltext and some citations. Use the Find It button to access the articles you want.
PsycINFO - the gold standard database for psychology and related fields. Also an EBSCO product.
Social Sciences Abstracts - articles and citations for interdisciplinary fields such as addiction studies, anthropology, corrections, economics, gender studies, gerontology, minority studies, political sciences, psychology, sociology, and more.

Some tips:

You can search the EBSCO databases simultaneously.
If you find a very relevant article, look at the subject terms in the record for the article. Then search using those terms to find other articles like it!
Once you know the prominent authors in the field, you can also search by author.
Use the suggested subjects on the lefthand side of the search results to limit your search in EBSCO databases.

WHAT DOES THAT CUTE LITTLE FIND IT BUTTON DO, ANYWAY?

It's a bit like magic, really. The Find It button does three things:

Looks in all of our databases to see if the document you want is available full-text in another of our databases. If so, it links you to it!
Links you to the library catalog when we have the item you want in print or microform.
Links you to ILLiad (interlibrary loan) so you can borrow the item from another library if we don't have access electronically or in print.

The Find It button is YOUR FRIEND!!!

You can also use the Citation Linker, another fabulously cool tool. It is useful when you are reading an article and it cites another article that looks like it would be super useful for your research. You plug in the citation information for that article and can find out how to access it, whether it be electronically, physically in the library, or through Interlibrary Loan. It works the same way as Find It, but you don't have to be in a database.

Learn more about the Citation Linker!

Citing your work:

Of course you want to make sure you give proper credit to any source that you use to write your papers, whether you directly quote or paraphrase. This guide helps students understand what plagiarism is and how to avoid it: http://www.salisbury.edu/library/plagiarism/student.html

Use this guide to help you cite your work, and remember librarians are good at answering citation questions as well!
http://www.salisbury.edu/library/citation/index.html