Joe, a smiling man with silver hair and eyeglasses in a blue plaid shirt. Please Remember Me explores aging.  How do health and social needs change over any person’s life?  How do economic development, urbanization, and current health care systems affect our families?  If the film opened your eyes to a new field of research, check out the library resources below for further reading or viewing options. Start with the tab on Aging in the LibGuide for Social Work: Policy for international projects, divisions, and centers.  Seniors are a special topic of research, affecting legal issues, psychology, and respect for wisdom.  Or if you are looking for data, this LibGuide on Public Health can prepare you for an appointment “The Age of the World Picture” by World Public Forum Dialogue of Civilizations is licensed under CC BY 2.0 with a librarian.  Caitlin Mannion is NYU Shanghai’s Social Work Librarian and she maintains a Shanghai-specific LibGuide on Social Work. You may want to set up email alerts about new articles published in the top journals, listed at the bottom of the LibGuide on Social and Public Policy.  Journals are published on different schedules; some once or twice a year, others every month or so.  With alerts, you don’t have to remember to visit a website.  Instead, you receive the table of contents listing the new releases.  Or you can request notices for specific topics or authors most relevant to your research.  This is how many professors keep up to date on research in his or her discipline.

What did the movie or discussion prompt you to think about?  If you are interested in pursuing one as part of your research this semester for a class paper, check with the library.  You may want to start with the materials listed below (films, books, and databases of research articles).  I’ll also explain using subject-specific databases to improve your search results on a broad term, such as “justice.” If you missed the movie, want to watch it again, or share with a classmate, you are welcome to check out the DVD on 4F.  Ask at the library desk.  We have a viewing room (bring your own headphones; sorry no popcorn allowed) in case your laptop doesn’t have a DVD player.  I know mine doesn’t; but it’s so much lighter than my last laptop!  You may also check with IT about their DVD player loan. If you want to answer “What does justice mean?” try our LibGuides or subject databases.  The LibGuide is a librarian’s road map to finding which of a thousand databases are best for your question.  In this case, try one of these four: Philosophy, Law, Psychology, or Social Work.  Your choice may depend on which classes you are taking, which readings have interested you in the past, or which element of justice you want to focus on, such as personal dignity, human rights, or self-worth. Databases are collections of articles, chapters, and journals on a single subject, such as Philosophy, Law, Psychology, or Social Work.  But forty databases on psychology can be a bit daunting! That’s why librarians write a guide’s introduction and curate (carefully select) the tabs for background information, statistics, and suggested books. I just read a lawyer’s review of how law and its study is developing in 21st century China.  If this post looks daunting, that’s why librarians are here to help prioritize where to start or which path to try. Inside the databases, the search bars won’t work like Google.  You may need to read their “Help” page or FAQ to learn whether AND or + joins terms, whether quotes or brackets join phrases, if plural forms are automatically added, and if a wildcard is * or ? among other symbols.  Some need you to search through the “Thesaurus” (often on the advanced search page) to learn that “Human Rights” is the chosen label for articles on “Justice.”  In that database, you may find too much searching “Justice,” but once you replace it with “Human Rights” you could see fewer, more relevant articles.  Or another example:  “Justice” may not have any results in psychology, but the thesaurus suggested  “Confession” or “Reconciliation.”  If neither term applied to the idea you are thinking of, open the scope notes (blue box) or open the description of “reconciliation.”  It may jog your memory for another term to search. Some subject databases are technically called “abstracts and indexes” or only a finding aid to know which articles are related to your topic.  The full text may live in another database.  That’s O.K.  You can still find the full text through an SFX box (usually in grey) or using the citation to understand which journal and number to look up on Bobcat’s Journals Tab.  Why are articles under the journals tab?  Because publishers bundle articles together every few months to print as a journal.  The publishers sell groups of journals on the same topic to database providers.  The library buys databases for broad access to research.  So, ultimately, you can find articles in both the Articles & Databases tab and in the Journals tab. In the end, searching takes time.  It starts with a spark of interest.  Don’t let that spark die with one or two unlucky searches.  Ask a librarian; sometimes talking about the topic opens doors.

Were you expecting the mini-series based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name?  Don’t worry, that DVD box is also available to watch in our viewing room on 4F. Chai Jing felt she had to live under a dome in Beijing, inspired by King’s story.  She trained as a reporter, the skills you are learning at university.  She asked questions about her daily life.  In 2017, Anna Lora-Wainwright wrote a similar perspective for MIT Press: Resigned Activism: Living with Pollution in Rural China (on the shelf in the library at TD187.5.C6 L67 2017).  What questions do you have?           Deep thinking or Critical thinking takes time.  It evolves slowly rather than in 2-4 hours of writing a term paper.  Critical thinking builds upon skills librarians call information literacy.  There are six; let’s focus on two, Reseach is Inquiry and Scholarship is Conversation. Chai Jing had a question about the air quality in Beijing.  She began conversations with businesses, educators, and government officials.  These conversations led to introductions, recommendations, and more questions.  Some conversations were with written documents, whether news articles, research documents, or government publications.  Others were in person or by phone.  For example, Matthew Kahne and Siqi Zheng wrote their research in 2017: Blue Skies over Beijing: Economic Growth and Environment in China by Princeton University Press. In creating her documentary, she pursued, analyzed, and synthesized information, whether as data, reports, or proclamations.  The research process includes identifying which problem or population (government body, event, chemical, animal, or person) you are interested in.  It is usually a noun that answers, “Who?”  The research process identifies an intervention or indicator which might be a specific moment, event, measurement, or process that affects the problem or population.  These two questions yield terms to search in a database or library for encyclopedias or introductions to the history and experts about them.  For Chai Jing, these may have been herself/her family and air quality in Beijing.  Some are inspired to act, such as David Pellow, in his 2007 book for MIT Press, Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice. As research continues, you may identify an outcome, specific time, or comparison to add to your search box to narrow the focus of your paper.  Adding these questions too early may limit your results.  For Chai Jing, these included when and how energy production occurs in China, the surgery to remove lumps from a lung, or how she remembers seeing the sun, blue sky, and stars years before.  Had she begun by searching “sun and stars Beijing” or “lung cancer Beijing”, she might have missed the bigger context of government regulations and energy production across northern China. Whether you find yourself at the early or later stages of your research journey, the librarians are available to chat, even on WeChat, or in person, and by email.

The film, Wolf Warrior 2, is also available to watch in the library’s viewing room or check out for your own DVD player.  It presents a thrilling view of international development (sometimes called international aid) and peacekeeping.  My mind is still thinking about different perspectives on foreign policies and nationalism.  Some films for comparison include Operation Red Sea or We Come As Friends.  The latter may be less thrilling, but it is honest to local viewpoints, and a list of resources from We Come as Friends Film Friday in May 2018 is available. In a university setting, debating comparative politics or US-China relations happens in journal articles.  An excellent example of one conversation over the years is published in International Security. In 2013, Iain Johnston wrote an article on Chinese “assertiveness” or its absence.  The following year, two academics, Dingding Chen and Xiaoyu Po, published their response, which included Johnston’s short reply to their questions.  Then in 2017, Johnston published another article with new evidence. Scholarly communications may not be as fast-paced as a ping-pong match, but reading the evolution of a debate can be very informative.  The authors and articles cited by these authors become a goldmine for students wondering where to efficiently begin searching. Another hot topic of research has been defining the official foreign policy of the Belt Road Initiative (formerly One Belt, One Road and sometimes called Silk Road Initiative).  Given the lack of formal documents or consistent names, researchers use methods and theories to illuminate what can be determined.  Financial Times has arranged an interactive graphic explaining the geography, history, and elements. Another good place to start is the library-subscribed database, Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO) where “one belt one road” yields 5 working papers or articles full of footnotes to reputable research. PAIS International is the other leading database of research in international relations.  A search there for “one belt one road” finds less than 100 options, which you could refine for peer review or being in scholarly journals (left menu).  You may compare the publication titles (another list in the left menu) with top journals in international relations in Journal Citation Reports, though many more factors affect the research value of an article than its impact factor. If all this seems a bit daunting, visit with a librarian!  We are in NYU-Shanghai’s official WeChat (Library) or at the desk Monday – Thursday noon to 2 pm.