[nabop] research at work

[Ashley Bramlett]

Hi all,

Research was always a struggle since except the internet access issues were there.  Also others such as articles being too old since most instructors want recent stuff, finding journals but your school doesn't subscribe to them, research articles conducted out of the United States, and articles being too narrow in scope.
Many of those were issues for all students.

Many times I used student readers since they can skim faster than with jaws and they can read any matterial whether it be electronic or hard copy.  I used books and reference books in the library not accessible but with a reader.  One reference book Cultural Grams about countries was great but without a reader it wasn't usable.


This issue has come up because I need to do research on bullying and crime prevention for an internship; its for the summer.  The first report I did with websites wich was easy but time consuming to do.  Now they want a lit review using googlescholar.com and other databases I can access as an alumni.  

If your job requires research what do you do and how do you do it?  I use jaws so most of the internet is accessible although some sites are less friendly.
Unfortunately
My questions:
1.  Is google scholar jaws friendly?  What other online scholarly sites are jaws friendly?

2. How do you use those PDF files?  What can you do in Openbook to access them?
Many full text articles were PDF rendering them inaccessible without using a scanner.
When I opened them jaws said "blank".

3. In databases with PDFs, do you find an option for a HTML link wich is a text link?  When searching google.com they have PDF files as HTML as well.
4. What do you do to determine if an article is relevant?  So far I thought of reading the abstract and/or intro.  Sometimes I read entire articles only 

Thanks for any tips.