High quality low cost or free research resources for evaluation professionals. Also useful for social science and professional researchers.

1. 10+ HIGH QUALITY/ LOW COST
RESEARCH RESOURCES FOR
EVALUATORS
Matthew Von Hendy MA/MLS
Green Heron Information Services

2. WELCOME!
 Owner—Green Heron
Information Services
 Professional
Librarian—National
Academies of Science,
EPA, NASA
 Birder, cyclist, runner—
recent Alaskan
adventurer

3. BROWN BAG GOALS
 Briefly discuss 10-20 high quality low cost research
resources and tools
 Questions and answers

4. SEARCH ENGINES

5. GOOGLE RULES!
 Google is the resource that professional evaluators
use to find research resources most often
 A few words of caution:
 Google ‘filters’ results based on previous searches
 Try searching in an alternate search engine to
double check your google results

6. ALTERNATE SEARCH ENGINES
 DuckDuckGo https://duckduckgo.com/
 Blekko http://blekko.com/
 Ixquick https://ixquick.com/
 Try searching your name on Google vs. these 3

7. HOT SEARCHING TIP #1
 When searching Google…
 Use the site filter to limit to a particular website or
type of domain ( site:http://www.epa.gov) or
site:edu
 Use the filetype filter to limit your results to PDFs
(filetype:PDFs)
 More google searching tips can be found at:
http://www.google.com/insidesearch/tipstricks/all.html

8. FREE FULL TEXT ARTICLES
 Google Scholar scholar.google.com
Subset of Google that focus on ‘academic’ literature
 Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/research-
papers/
Crowd-sourcing site—many researchers have
downloaded their work here
Directory of Open Access Journals http://doaj.org/
Somewhat of a ‘work in progress’ but does allow
searching for articles

9. HOT SEARCH TIP #2
 Tip:
For Google Scholar:
Use the Advanced Search by clicking on the
downward facing carat on the right side of the search
box

11. RESEARCH DATABASES
 Excellent sources of high quality information—
 Almost every field has a good free research
database
 Articles/information is often abstracted and indexed
aiding searching

12. SOME EXAMPLES
 (Health Sciences) PubMed
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed
 (Education) ERIC http://eric.ed.gov/
 (Transportation) TRID http://trid.trb.org/
 For Science and Technology Resources see my
article..
http://www.infotoday.com/OnlineSearcher/Articl
es/Features/Fifty-Shades-of-Scientific-and-
Technical-Grey-Literature-96758.shtml

13. HOT SEARCH TIP #3
 Some publishers offer discounted rates for one-time
access to their research resources
 American Psychological Association (APA) offers a
$11.95 24 hour pass to their 3 major databases
including PsycINFO—
 http://www.apa.org/pubs/databases/access/direct.a
spx

14. DO YOUR CITATIONS LOOK LIKE THIS?

15. CITATION MANAGERS CAN HELP…
 Organize your citations
 Citation information can be downloaded directly
from most search tools into many citation managers
 Allow for PDFs to be attached to articles
 Can be shared between people if they are using the
same program
 Automatically creates in-text citations and reference
lists in a specified citation format (APA 5th, MLA)

16. FREE CITATION MANAGERS
 Endnote Web http://www.myendnoteweb.com/
(There is a full version of Endnote which requires a
subscription).
 Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/
 Zotero https://www.zotero.org/

17. TRACKING FEDERAL AND STATE
LEGISLATION
 Congress.gov New website developed by Library
of Congress to track federal legislation
http://beta.congress.gov/
 National Conference of State Legislature List of
State Billing Tracking Sites
http://www.ncsl.org/research/telecommunicatio
ns-and-information-technology/bill-tracking-
and-subscription-services.aspx
 Bill Track 50 – Search federal and state bills
http://www.billtrack50.com/

19. GOVERNMENT REPORTS
 Great sources for topical overviews, recent
resources and up to date statistics
 General Accounting Office http://www.gao.gov/
 Congressional Research Service Open Access
https://opencrs.com/

20. HOT SEARCH TIP #4
 When searching databases use these 5 action
words to find evaluation related articles on a
particular topic
 Assess, analyze, evaluate, measure, impact
 (“youth violence”) and (assess* or analyz* or evalu*
or measure* or impact*)

21. GREY LITERATURE
 What is it?
 Essentially everything that is not a journal article or
a book
 Most evaluation-related works are grey literature
resources
 They are usually hard to find because they are
typically not included in the major databases
(Google will pick up some but not all of them)

22. GREY LITERATURE RESOURCES
 New York Academy of Medicine Grey Lit Report-
- http://www.greylit.org/
Health sciences, health policy including evaluation
 Popline -- http://www.popline.org/
Reproductive health and family planning
 Defense Technical Information Center --
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/
DOD sponsored publicly available research

24. QUESTIONS?

25. IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS LATER…
 Always happy to chat about research questions
and research resources
 Monthly newsletter on research resources and
tips for evaulators – if you are interested in
getting it – email me: info@greenheroninfo.com

26. CONNECT WITH ME
 Matthew Von Hendy
Green Heron Information Services
(240) 401-7433
info@greenheroninfo.com
www.greenheroninfo.com
LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/vonhendy
Twitter @GreenHeronInfo

27. THANK YOU!