We'll provide a brief, immediate response to ready-reference questions.
Or, for more in-depth research needs we'll prepare a customized bibliography for you spanning a wide variety of media formats. We prepare most of these to send out via email. They'll include items available online as well as citations to others that we may be able to help you obtain via interlibrary Loan if you are not on the National Emergency Training Center campus. Get results now and check out our list of frequently requested research topics.
Call or email us and let us know how we can help. Our toll-free number is 800-638-1821.
Enter your keywords or phrases representing synonyms or related terms for a topic of interest. Try to use a variety of keywords since additional items on your topic may use different terms.
OR
(making sure OR is capitalized) and the catalog will return all citations that contain any one or more of the terms you list.flashover OR backdraft
yields over 450 records where either one or both terms are present.AND
operator in a search, it narrows your results to only records containing all of your search terms. (The catalog automatically applies the Boolean AND operator).flashover AND backdraft
returns about 40 records where both terms are present in each record.“smoke explosion”
returns more than a half dozen hits where this exact phrase appears.The Executive Fire Officer (EFO) applied research projects are written by individual students after they leave campus as part of their class assignment. These research papers are available for in-house use by library visitors, for checkout by National Emergency Training Center users, and for loan to off-campus users via interlibrary loan.
The library only retains EFO papers that received a grade of 3.0 or better. All other papers are entered into the library catalog with an abstract only. If you would like to get a copy of a paper for which the library has only retained an abstract, you'll need to contact the author directly. Most EFO papers published since 1998 are now available to download or read online in their entirety. You'll see links in our online catalog citations to these papers as they are available in digits. There is a backlog in scanning current year papers so the most recent titles may still be unavailable online.
Style guides show you how to properly cite your information sources. There are four main style guides: American Psychological Association, Modern Language Association, Chicago Manual of Style, and Turabian.
Reference tools: there are a wide variety of reference tools found in both print and online formats. Often, you'll find some ideally suited for your topic. Reference materials point you to other sources of information.
Encyclopedias, handbooks, codes and guidebooks are among the many resources that fall into this category.
Check out this list of reference texts for the fire service.
Books: try searching the library catalog. Go to the General Keyword search link, enter your term(s) and choose Books from the Document Types drop-down menu.
You can also try browsing our stacks. You'll find our fire science related books organized in general terms as follows:
Periodical Literature: Journals, newsletters, and magazines are all valuable sources of information. The library's catalog is a unique guide to this periodical literature with citations on fire, emergency response, natural disaster, and homeland security topics going back to the early 1970s. Library staff index nearly 5,000 newly published articles each year, from scores of professional journals, magazines and newsletters across the country and internationally. Try using the library catalog and limit your search this time to Journal Articles. Any citations you find will be available at the National Emergency Training Center library. Alternatively you can take any citations you find to your nearest public library and they can help you obtain the materials either thru their own print or electronic holdings or via interlibrary loan.
Reports, dissertations, proceedings: can be found in a wide variety of formats, including print and electronic. Our library catalog is also a great place to begin searching for government documents and reports from think tanks and professional organizations of all kinds as well as papers already published by students in the Executive Fire Officer program. You can use the checkboxes on our advanced search page to begin your search for these types of materials.
You may also want to go just enter a General Keyword search and limit your results by type for reports, dissertations, proceedings and other materials by choosing from the choices that appear on the left side of your see arch result screen.
The Internet: You can find some great information on the Internet, but you must always carefully evaluate the web pages you find. Educational sites (.edu), US Government sites (.gov) are often reliable sources for information. Search engines like USA.gov or the library's Google Custom Search Engine.
The following are the 5 evaluation criteria used in evaluating sources.
Write the paper or give the presentation. Organize your Information - using an outline is always a good idea. Download the NETC Library Writing Guide PDF 15 KB for an easy to use template on drafting an essay.
A citation is a reference to an exact Information Source where the author got his/her info. Cite your sources to:
Plagiarism is the unacknowledged inclusion, in work submitted for credit, of someone else’s words, ideas, or data. The failure to identify any source, published or unpublished, copyrighted or non copyrighted from which information, terms, phrases, or concepts have been taken, constitutes plagiarism.
Citations contain the following minimum information:
Sample book citation for a reference list in APA format:
Sample journal article citation for a reference list in APA format: