The topic a student selects or one that is assigned, can greatly affect the amount of information a student can retrieve in magazines or scholarly publications.

For example, a student selected the following topic: Has the increased reference to the drug "ectsasy" in hip hop music increased usage of the drug among African American youth.

The student was required to use only scholarly articles for this research paper. Restricting the use of scholarly journals for this topic is problematic. The use of the drug ecstasy by African Americans in the United States is a relatively new phenomenon.  The references to the drug made by rap artists is also a newer occurrence.  As a result, there is less likely to be scholarly research on either sub-topic.

An information literate student should be able to perform a quick search of research databases to determine that there are no scholarly articles published on his topic. In turn, the same student would then be able to determine alternate methods for finding scholarly articles.  The first would be to expand his search and possibly the focus of his topic to examine related topics e.g. drug abuse among African American youth, rap music and drug references, or empirical studies on the use of ecstasy by young adults.  An information literate student would understand that information from a variety of sources, would help formulate and modify his hypothesis.

The student used the following sources and found these articles:

Medline: Click here and in the search box type "ecstasy and drug abuse". 

PsycInfo: Click here to see a sample of results from a search in PsycInfo (please note: you must be on campus to see the results of this search)

Do you think these articles would be useful

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