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Welcome to SFU Library's Research Skills Tutorials.
This video focuses on searching for news sources available through SFU Library to find background information on a topic.
It can be hard to decide what's interesting or important about a research topic when you don't know anything about it.
Whether you're still deciding on what to write about, or need background information on a current event,
one way of getting inspired is to turn to news sources.
News reports can provide the basic facts on a topic, and because they're produced for a general audience,
they're intended to be easy to read.
As well, editorials and other news features will offer an analysis or insight on a topic and its issues,
allowing you to see a topic from different perspectives.
Let's go to the SFU Library homepage to start looking for news sources.
Under the Find menu, select Journal articles and databases.
From the Browse databases by subject area, scroll down until you get to News Sources, and select Browse.
The News Sources page lists all the news databases available through SFU Library, and what types of newspapers each database offers.
Let's say I'm interested in what the Canadian media has reported on climate change and Canadian policy.
I'm going to select Canadian Newstand. It's going to have the Canadian perspective I'm looking for.
From this database reocrd, I can see which newspapers are included, or indexed, in this database.
It's also good practice to check the date coverage of any news source.
That way, you can quickly know what you'll have full access to at the beginning of your search.
Click on Connect to access Canadian Newsstand.
If you're accessing this database from off- campus, or from your own laptop,
you will need to log in with your SFU computing ID and password.
From this advanced search page, I'm going to search using the keywords "climate change," and Canada, and policy.
Under Publication Date, from the pull down menu, I'm going to select Last Three Years, so that I'm only looking at recent news.
This also makes the number of search results slightly more manageable. Let's click on Search.
Here are my search results. 5659 articles. That is way too much!
I can narrow down my search results even more using the right-hand menu.
For example, let's say I'm only interested in what's been published in Vancouver, as well as in another major national paper.
Under Publication Title, I'm going to click on More options,
then select "The Vancouver Sun" and "The Globe and Mail." Let's click on apply.
This brings my search results down to 879 articles.
This third article looks promising, so I'm going to click on it.
And here it is, in full-text.
Look for references to notable people, organizations, events, and publications.
You can use these references to do more research later.
Journalists have tight deadlines to meet, which means that sometimes facts on a rapidly evolving
or cutting-edge topic can change. Keep in mind that a news source can be useful in shaping your background research,
just make sure to find additional sources to verify what you’ve read.
This concludes our tutorial on how to search for news sources to find background information.
Thanks for watching!