The Root of Research Queries

 

The Root of Research Queries

    Last week I was working on an assignment for one of my graduate classes.  The task was to Choose a term related to the course and use different resources to find how many research articles were found in each database.  I admit I fumbled through it relying heavily on the ERIC database.  So I thought I would share some alternative sources/databases and give some tips on how to limit your search for quality articles.

    If you are a student, your school library should be able to grant you access to many databases. For this blog post I will just stick to education related sources.  

Education Source (EBSCO)is a source that can only be access through a purchasing Library. According to my school library this source was created from a merger of H.W. Wilson's Education Index and EBSCO's Education Research Complete. It is comprised of full-text education journals, and provides scholarly research and information to meet the needs of education students, professionals, and policy makers covering all levels of education — from early childhood to higher education — as well as all educational specialties such as multilingual education, health education, and testing. 

The Education Resource Information Center (ERIC) is another source accessible through a purchasing library. ERIC is an index of journal literature in education, as well as education-related material such as books, conference papers, technical reports, policy papers, curriculum materials, and theses. Not all search results are full papers but your library should have a way to get access to the full article. 

Google Scholar is a good place to start your search. With its vast amount of scholarly literature, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. 

 

ResearchGate is another free site like Google Scholar. According to wikipedia ResearchGate is a European commercial social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators.

    Now that you know of a few places to start your research, the next issue is how to find the right articles that pertain to the specific topic you want to research.  Listed below are a few ways to refine your searches to grab the perfect articles for your purposes.

Search Limiters: 

• Full Text- Only pulls complete articles
• Peer Reviewed- Only pulls articles from peer reviewed sources
• Publication Type-you can select the specific types of literature to include in your search
• Publication Date-you can select a date window to limit all sources that were published within that time frame.
• Key Words- you can combine key terms that you are researching.  This can be used to limit or increase the number of results.

Boolean Operators:

Boolean Operators are simple words (AND, OR, NOT or AND NOT) used as conjunctions to combine or exclude keywords in a search, resulting in more focused and productive results. 

AND—requires both terms to be in each item returned. If one term is contained in the document and the other is not, the item is not included in the resulting list. (Narrows the search) One example could be Adaptive Learning AND Technology would require all result to have all of those terms in the source.

OR—either term (or both) will be in the returned document. (Broadens the search)  An example could be Adaptive Learning or Personalized Learning.  This would increase relevant articles.  Using synonyms will help in your search as well. 

NOT or AND NOT ( dependent upon the coding of the database's search engine)—the first term is searched, then any records containing the term after the operators are subtracted from the results. If you wanted to find articles about Texas State Parks but you don't want to include parks that have RV Camping your could search query could be TEXAS STATE PARKS AND NOT RV CAMPING. 

Using Parentheses and other Modifiers—Using the ( ) to enclose search strategies will customize your results to more accurately reflect your topic. Search engines deal with search statements within the parentheses first, then apply any statements that are not enclosed.  Quotations "" can be used to limit your search to all articles with the phrase within the quotation marks. Using an Asterisk will include all forms of the word.  For instance if you want your search to include all forms of the work therapy, therapies, therapeutic then in your query you would type Therap*. The following videos are a great resource to have on hand for yourself or your students. 

    I hope this will help you the next time you have to do research or you want to teach your students how to google something more effectively.