Today you are going to search for some articles using the library's Gale In Context Opposing Viewpoints database. You'll get some practice using this database to find information, and to think about whether or not the information that you find is good at supporting your ideas.
To access Gale In Context Opposing Viewpoints, go to the library's website, either through MyPath, or from the college’s website: madisonville.kctcs.edu. Select "Quick Links" at the top, and then “Current Students.”
Scroll down to "Library."
And now that you are at the library's website, go down to "Research databases."
And then look for "Gale In Context Opposing Viewpoints" in the second box. Log in with your KCTCS username and password if prompted to do so.
Gale Opposing Viewpoints is an easy-to-use database that shows you information about key issues. It's a great database for English 101 because you can find information on a lot of topics that you can write about for the cause/effect paper, or the position paper. These are two of the assignments in English 101 that instructors usually assign, and require students to cite library resources in their work.
Articles that you find in Opposing Viewpoints can come from published newspapers, magazines, or scholarly journals. But you will find featured viewpoint articles on many topics. The viewpoint articles show you the pros and cons, the causes or the effects, or an argument for or against a certain issue.
Today what we'll do is we'll pick a topic and see what we can find on that topic.
The topic that we'll use today is depression. Depending on your instructor, you might be reading the book The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. One of the essays from the book, called “Harvey,” talks about the author’s personal struggles with depression and some of the ways he sought treatment. Today you're going to find some information on that topic in just a little bit. Just to demonstrate how this database works, I'm going to focus on antidepressants: what causes them to work, and what effects they might have on treating depression.
Before you search in Opposing Viewpoints, you might want to check out the "Browse Issues" list here, on the right.
This is a list of over 200 different issues ranging from Adoption to Women's rights. "Depression" is one of the issues on this page, so let's take a look.
These topic pages load on your screen with articles already in place. At the top is an overview page, giving you a definition of the problem or the issue, followed by different articles, broken down by source type.
So for example, all of the newspaper articles are going to be grouped together under "news." And all of the scientific studies are going to be grouped together under "Academic journals."
Viewpoint articles, which again are argumentative and usually pretty good for supporting the ideas in your writing, are at the top, under "Featured viewpoints" and "Viewpoints." Notice that your results page here shows you the top 3 of each source type, and you can access more of that source type by clicking above the box. Let's take a quick break, and then in the next video we'll look at searching in Opposing Viewpoints.