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Using Academic Sources

This is a companion guide to "Finding Academic Sources". Its goal is to make student researchers more comfortable with using scholarly material in their own research.

Using CTRL+F

A handy but underused way of quickly scanning an article (or a website or another kind of file) is the "Find" function. "Control+F" (or "Command+F" on a Mac) is the keyboard shortcut for the Find command. If you're in a document or in a web browser, pressing the Ctrl key + the F key will bring up a search box in the top right corner of the screen.  You can then type in a keyword or phrase to find places where that word or phrase is used in the text, often helpful for locating relevant sections.  

View the video below for quick example of how this works and then go on to the activity.

Activity

Try out Ctrl+F to answer the questions in the prompt below:

Within the article "Required and Non-Required College Physical Activity Classes Effect on College Students' Stress" use Ctrl+F to search the text on the keyword beneficial.  Based on this search, did this study find evidence that physical activity classes were beneficial to college students' stress levels?  Did it matter whether the physical activity classes were required or not?