ENGL 1A - Gabrielsson - English Research Guide - Research Guides at Pasadena City College

Welcome ENG 1A students!

This resource guide will help you:

Locate library databases that contain newspaper, scholarly/peer-reviewed, and magazine articles.
Utilize strategies to search for articles in a library database.
Locate suggested resources to assist with MLA style.

Here are the slides shown during the in-person library research session:

Suggested Library Databases

EBSCOhost (Combined)
Contains: journal, magazine, and newspaper articles covering all disciplines. PCC offers a brief video with instructions for using this database, and more advanced ways to improve your search,
JSTOR (including Artstor)
Contains scholarly journal articles, books, and primary sources in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Also includes thousands of searchable, high-quality Artstor images covering architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, design, and more.
ProQuest (combined)
Contains articles from: academic journals, newspapers, magazines and other periodicals covering a variety of subject areas.
US Major Dailies (ProQuest)
Contains newspaper articles from the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, and Washington Post. PCC offers a brief video with instructions for using this database.
Chronicle of Higher Education
A leading source of news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty members and administrators. For students, a great source of timely journalism and opinion for research in the area of education. Please see instructions for off-campus access.

Looking for more databases to choose from?
Check out PCC Library's full list of databases on the A-Z Database List page.

Library Database Search Tips

Brainstorm and enter your search terms into the keyword search box to start a search. For example:

student success
college financial aid
digital divide

These "Boolean operators" let you refine your search:

AND = narrows your search
OR = broadens your search

For example:

student retention AND community college
student success AND internet access
colleges OR universities
gen X OR generation X
student success OR academic success

Use quotation marks to search on specific phrases:

"first generation students"
"community colleges"

Use filters to further refine your results. For example:

use the "journals" or "articles" filter to display only the scholarly article content
use the date filter to enter a date range

MLA Citations

The following slides describe how to create MLA references and format a Works Cited page:

Additional Resources:

PCC Library's MLA Quick Guide
"official" MLA Handbook, 9th Ed. (PCC Library has print and online copies)

AI Usage

From Professor Gabrielsson ....

⚠️ Here's My Rule on AI Use (Read This First!)

You may not use ChatGPT or any AI tool to:

Find or suggest your sources for you
Summarize or read articles for you
Write your essay (obviously!)

You can use ChatGPT to:

Help brainstorm keywords
Build a Boolean search string (aka smart search terms)
Ask questions that help you think through your topic

Think of it like a research coach, not a ghostwriter.

Academic research goes beyond Google. The library database gives you access to high-quality, credible, and peer-reviewed sources that are appropriate for college-level writing.
This is a skill you'll need throughout college. Learning to navigate academic databases and locate reliable sources is an essential part of succeeding in higher education.
Fake or AI-generated sources are a real issue. Last semester, several students used CoPilot and ChatGPT to generate citations for sources that didn't actually exist. This behavior creates a frustrating and time-consuming situation where I have to verify each source, rather than spend that time giving you meaningful feedback on your ideas and writing.
AI can be used in limited, appropriate ways. You may use AI tools to help generate effective Boolean search terms to use within the database. This can be a great strategy to refine your searches. However, using AI to fabricate sources or citations is a violation of academic integrity.
Use a permanent link (not just the browser URL). When you cite your sources, make sure to include the database’s permalink or stable URL. These are more reliable than copying the link from your browser’s address bar and ensure I can easily access the source you’ve used.

I know a lot of you are curious about using tools like ChatGPT or CoPilot, and that’s totally okay — with some rules. For Writing Assessment #3, I want you to feel supported, but I also want to make sure you’re still doing the thinking and researching yourself.

Try pasting one of these into ChatGPT:

“Help me create a Boolean search string to investigate how financial stress affects graduation rates in community colleges.”
“Give me keywords I can use in a database to search for how mental health affects student success.”
“What are some synonyms or related terms for institutional barriers in higher ed?”

These prompts are great for getting started — not for skipping the hard parts. Here is a sample conversation between ChatGPT and me to give you an idea for how the process works:

🔍 Once You Have a Search String...

Copy and paste it into one of our library databases
Filter for:
- ✅ Peer-reviewed
- ✅ 2018–2025
- ✅ Higher education or community college focus
Save the articles that seem useful

We’ll walk through this together in class, but you can also experiment on your own.

💬 TL;DR

✅ Yes, you can use ChatGPT — to help build your search
❌ No, you can’t use it to find your sources or write your paper
🧩 Think of it as a puzzle helper — you’re still the one putting it together

You’ve got this!

—Professor Gabrielsson (with assistance from ChatGPT to create realistic examples)

Snyder's On Tyranny

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder
Publication Date: 2017

A physical/print copy of this book is available at the PCC Library circulation desk (main level) in the "Reserves" collection.

Description: With Twenty Lessons, Snyder draws from the darkest hours of the twentieth century to provide hope for the twenty-first. As he writes, "Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism and communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience."

Suggested Ebooks

Diversity Regimes: Why Talk Is Not Enough to Fix Racial Inequality at Universities by James M. Thomas
Publication Date: 2020
As a major, public flagship university in the American South, so-called "Diversity University" has struggled to define its commitments to diversity and inclusion, and to put those commitments into practice. In Diversity Regimes, sociologist James M. Thomas draws on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork at DU to illustrate the conflicts and contingencies between a core set of actors at DU over what diversity is and how it should be accomplished. Thomas’s analysis of this dynamic process uncovers what he calls "diversity regimes": a complex combination of meanings, practices, and actions that work to institutionalize commitments to diversity, but in doing so obscure, entrench, and even magnify existing racial inequalities.
Recognizing Promise: The Role of Community Colleges in a Post Pandemic World by Baston, Bridglall, and Nettles (Eds.)
Publication Date: 2022
COVID-19 has exposed and exacerbated entrenched inequities spawned by the historical and structural reality of bigotry, prejudice, discrimination, and inequity in all forms, and at institutional and individual levels. It is perceived that higher education institutions also perpetuates these inequities, which is fuelled by prevailing misconceptions, such as "college should be limited to the privileged few"; or that "community colleges are in some way 'inferior'." Recognizing Promise re-establishes the role community colleges can play in reversing centuries of racial and gender disparities in economic wealth, health, education, and life expectancy stemming from current and historical policies and practices that sustain structural racism.
Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Student Activism by Jelani M. Favors
Publication Date: 2019
For generations, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been essential institutions for the African American community. They not only provided educational advancement but also catalyzed the Black Freedom Struggle. Jelani Favors offers a history of HBCUs told through the lens of how they fostered student activism.