In most cases, you'll need to do a search to find something more specific or closely related to the topic you're writing about.
For example, if you’re trying to find information on stress, then just typing in the word stress is going to give you way too many results. You're going to find info on stress management, different ways in which a person can become stressed, like at work or at home, or even different definitions of the word stress, like in medicine when you have a stress fracture, or in physics where stress is pressure or tension exerted on a material object. We call that a search that is "too broad."
Instead, I'm going to type in the word anxiety and that should narrow down our topic a little bit, since that word better defines stress as a mental health topic.
You can narrow your topic even more and focus on something very specific. Just be careful not to get too specific, as then your search is "too narrow." Agoraphobia in children of immigrants, for example, doesn't give you many results, because that topic is very specific and there might not be a lot of information on it.
A more specific topic about depression or anxiety would be the methods used to treat depression and anxiety, such as the use of antidepressants. So let's see if we can find some articles that discuss what antidepressants are and what causes antidepressants to work. I’ll type in ‘antidepressants’ and hit search.
Search results are broken down by source type, just like on a topic page, with the top 3 of each source type shown. The viewpoint articles that they're showing talk a little bit more about the controversy of antidepressants. For years, doctors have been saying that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and that antidepressants have the effect of straightening out that chemical imbalance. But newer controversial research shows that depression is not mainly caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and therefore because the cause of depression is not the same thing that the medicine is treating, the effectiveness of antidepressants has been called into question. The first two articles on the list talk about how antidepressants are still useful despite the newer research. We’ll come back to that in a minute. But first, let’s learn a little bit more about antidepressants and how they work.
If we go down to this article here, “Antidepressants,” under "reference," it will give us more background information about antidepressants and specifically what they are and how they work.
So if we read these sections “Introduction” and “Overview,” you can see that this medicine is used to rebalance the brain chemistry in those who are experiencing depression, and that its effects were actually discovered accidentally. Doctors assumed that because antidepressants had a positive effect on the levels of serotonin in the brain, that it meant that this chemical imbalance was the cause of depression. Further studies have shown that this chemical imbalance is not entirely what causes depression.
If we go back and look at some of the viewpoint articles now, we can get some more ideas about what the effects of using antidepressants might be, despite the fact that chemical imbalances might not be the cause of depression.
Let's take a look at this article: "The Chemical Imbalance Theory of Depression is Dead."
This article talks about how the theory that having a chemical imbalance in the brain is what causes depression was partly developed based on what the medicine was known to specifically treat. Because the medicine increased serotonin in the brain, doctors assumed that the lack of serotonin in the brain must have been the cause of depression. This theory has mostly been disproven, but antidepressants still seem to work well in treating depression.
The goal is to find information that supports your ideas. If you're doing a paper on the causes or the effects of depression or antidepressants, these articles do a good job of supporting those ideas. You could also do a position paper on this topic that argues that antidepressants are overly prescribed, and some other treatment methods such as counseling might work better at treating depression.
One last thing you'll need to pay attention to is finding your MLA citation for your article. An MLA citation lists the information about the article: the title, the author, the publication, when it was published, etc. This MLA citation goes in your Works Cited page, which is at the end of your paper.
In Opposing Viewpoints, you can click "Cite" at the top right. A box will pop up showing you an MLA citation - 9th edition, by default.
It shows the author -- with their last name first. The title of the article in quotation marks. The source it was published in, in italics. The publisher was Gale. Then it shows the year. This is the database we used to access it: Gale In Context Opposing Viewpoints. And this is the url for the article. And the date we accessed it goes next. And that's really all you need. Sometimes it gives you a little bit of extra information. But you don't really need to include that. You will need to pay attention to capitalization and punctuation. But for the most part, you're going to want to copy and paste this into your Works Cited page in order to show your instructor where this source came from.
So Opposing Viewpoints is a pretty easy database to use. You'll want to use it when looking up information on important and controversial issues. You can browse issues, or search using the search box. You might need to try different search terms depending on if your search results are too broad or too narrow. Search results are broken down into different source types, which makes it easier to find the information you need.
Now it's going to be your turn. I showed you how to find information about one aspect of depression. Now, you're going to be asked to find information about anxiety disorders. Once you complete this assignment, you'll have an opportunity to learn more about some of the library's other databases.