FYS: Navigating Attention Capitalism (Roehrkasse)

Welcome to the Research Guide for the First Year Seminar:

Navigating Attention Capitalism

This guide is meant to help you develop the skills and tools to accomplish your course objectives.

The library (and your librarian) are here to help you! Use us early and often!

What's the best go-to research strategy?
It really depends on what type of information you're looking for, what type of research project you're working on, your topic/question, and other factors (e.g. the guidelines for your assignment or project!). But in general, getting clear on your goals and your constraints is a good place to start. From there, you can start with a broad search to get an overview of your topic, and then use what you find in this broad search to help narrow your focus down to your topic of interest. Leaving yourself plenty of time to explore and modify your approach is also helpful. 

How do I know where to start?
Clarifying what type of information you need is helpful here. For example, if you're trying to understand a topic that is completely new to you, it might be helpful to start with a broad Google search or a multidisciplinary database like Academic Search Elite. Keep in mind that you may need to try multiple places in order to find the information you need - so there's probably not one perfect database or publication to start with.  

What if I find something that looks useful but I can't access it?
First make sure you're being recognized as part of Butler - a quick way to do this is to try and search for the title of the item in the library catalog (make sure to put the title in quotes so that it's recognized as an entire phrase). If you've tried that and still can't access something, contact the library - we may be able to borrow it from another library through ILL to send to you.

Does everyone at Butler have access to the same information, or does it depend on major?
Information resources that are paid for by the library are available to all Butler students, faculty, and staff. However, some very specialized resources might typically only be used by students in certain programs - for example, our pharmacy databases are mostly used by students in the Pharmacy or Physician Assistant programs. 

How do I find sources that are both relevant and credible?
Keep in mind that there is probably not one perfect source that captures all of the information you need. If you find you're only getting resources that match keywords, and not your overall topic, you might try searching by subject terms, or forward and backward reference searching (see the Search Tips tab on this guide for more details). As for credibility, SIFT is an approach to information evaluation the library recommends (see the SIFT tab on this guide for details).

How can I find peer-reviewed sources?
Many library databases have some type of "peer-reviewed" filter than can be added to your search results - for example, in the Academic Search Elite database, you can select the "Peer Reviewed" button below the search bar to ensure your results only included peer-reviewed sources. 

How can you quickly determine if a source is what you need, before spending too much time on it?
Does it meet the criteria you need in terms of source type, etc.? If it's an academic article, because these articles are structured in a very specific way, you can approach them strategically by jumping around to different sections of the article (see the "How to Read a Scholarly Journal Article" video on the Anatomy of an Article tab in this guide for one approach). For books or films, looking up book reviews or film reviews can give you an overview of what's in the resources without needing to read or watch the entire thing. For books, also remember to skim the table of contents and introductions, which can give you an overview of what is discussed in the text.

How often do students use library resources to search for information?
Great question! While this isn't a question that can be fully answered based on the data the library collects, I can share some stats. For the month of September 2025, library databases were logged into by students an average of 580 times per day. There are about 5,000 students attending Butler. Also for the month of September 2025, the library catalog was searched about 50,000 times (although we can't tell how many of these searches came from students). We do know that most students also use publicly available search tools like Google or Google Scholar to find information - library resources are just different types of tools available in your toolkit, to use in combination with other sources of information. 

How can you organize your sources so that they complement each other?
One approach to considering how you can organize your sources within a paper is the BEAM method. This method asks you to consider the usefulness of a particular source as Background, Exhibit, Argument, or Method (see the BEAM tab on this guide for more details).