Hello, educational researchers and Scholars of the ESFR 5013 course. My name is Christine Edwards and I am the Graduate Studies Librarian. I am going to share this video with you in the hopes that you can use these tips and tricks to become more effective and efficient researchers during this class. We're going to start here on the library homepage. I'm going to encourage you to watch this video twice. The first time please just watch and see what I do. The second time I encourage you to pause and follow along with me. Pause the video as much as you need to in order to learn the different steps that we're doing. The first thing that I want to say is bypass this central search bar. You are in a higher level of research at this point. We want you to go into the databases themselves that house the types of articles that you need. Find the resources box in the middle of the page and click on databases. Databases are more subject specific and have additional limiters that you can use to narrow your search, and this will save you a lot of time and a lot of effort. We're going to start with a database called PsycInfo that starts with the letter P. I'm going to come to my alphabet line, I'm going to click on the letter P. I'm going to scroll most all the way down for this one because it happens to be at the bottom of this list. The reason I like PsycInfo is because it's the only database we have that has a methodology limiter. And it's really important for your sources that they are empirical studies and we'll talk more about that in just a moment. But find PsycInfo and click there. This will take us into the PsycInfo database which is hosted by ProQuest. You'll notice it has its own search bar. And that is where we're going to begin. When you think about your topic, I want you to begin with only the biggest two or three keywords about your topic. E.g. I'm researching critical pedagogy, so I'm going to start with those two words. Once you have your keywords type into the search bar, go ahead and conduct your search. The reason I say only start with two or three is because the more words you add to a search bar, the fewer the results you will get. Here you can see that I'm starting out with 4,800 results. Before I begin to look at my results, I want to narrow down the criteria of what I'm looking for. I really want to make sure that I am limiting to peer reviewed scholarly articles. This is because of the editorial process that they go through that ensures by the time they reach the scholarly community, they've been looked at for reliability and validity. So I'm going to click that peer review box and let it refresh. That immediately cuts our results in half, which is really nice because no one wants to wade through 4,800 results anyway. The second limiter I want you to consider is your publication date. We're talking about current research, we're talking about the last five to ten years. I'm going to enter a date range here. I'm going to tell it I want to start with the year 2013 and until now. I don't need to put a date in the other box because I'm coming to current. I click my update button and I allow it to refresh. This takes us from 2,400 to 1,600. Again, by being more specific with my criteria, I'm getting better results, which makes me a more effective researcher and is going to make my looking through my results more efficient. Other limiters that you might want to notice are things like age group. Perhaps you are researching childhood because you're dealing with K - 5. Perhaps you are researching high schoolers. Then you would look at adolescence, so forth and so on. Another limiter that you might want to use is population. If you are focusing specifically on males or females or another group, then population is where you would narrow down to that group. Then of course the very important methodology limiter. Now again, PsycInfo is the only database that has this limiter, which is extremely helpful because I can narrow to those empirical studies. In other databases, you might want to include empirical study type keywords into your search bar, such as empirical, qualitative, quantitative, or even a case study. Here, I can simply click on empirical study and trust that I'm going to be getting those empirical studies. This brings me down to 844 results. This is getting pretty nice. But now I can come back to my search bar and say, well, what else do I want to know? I'm specifically interested in critical pedagogy as it relates to the field of education. I'm going to add another keyword to my search bar. Doing my search with another word brings my results down to 745. Now here are where some of my tricks and tips are going to start coming into play. One of the tricks is called phrase searching. Sometimes we have two or more words that we treat as a phrase or as like a single term. Critical pedagogy is one of those phrases. When we are talking about this, we're talking about those two words together in that order. Speech language pathology is three words that are often used as a single term. When you have words that you need stuck together, you can actually tell the computer you want them stuck together by putting them inside quotation marks. This tells the computer, I want these two words together in this order. That's important because some of these results may talk about pedagogy and how it's critical that we have a pedagogy. But they're not talking about the actual "critical pedagogy" movement or theory. By being more specific, I will bring my search results down to 133. That is one of the tricks that you can use, phrase searching. Another trick that you can use is the term NOT. If there's something in your results that you don't want, you can use the word NOT to get rid of it. So, for example, looking at my first three results here, my third result is coming from Malaysia. If I don't want the things from Malaysia, I can actually say NOT Malaysia and any article that uses the term Malaysia will disappear from my results. We know we're going to get rid of at least one... so I got rid of three! That's a little one to show you, but sometimes that's important. Say if you're studying autism and you want to make sure that your articles deal with general autism and not the specific aspergers, you could say not aspergers. I'm going to go ahead and revert back to the search that we were doing before. But feel free to use the NOT to narrow things down if you need to. Now, let's pretend for a moment that instead of 133 results, I only have 33 results. This would be a case where I need to broaden my search back up. And there are two tricks I'm going to show you that can broaden your search. The first is called truncation. Truncation is where you take a word, you cut it off at a trunk, and you allow it to branch out. I can do this with the word education. Right now the search results all have the word education. But what if some of the articles talk about educational or educators? In order to bring back all those results, I'm going to cut my education word off at a trunk, add an asterisk, and that way allow it to branch out to all the different endings such as educate, educates, educated, educator, educators, education and educational. Let's see what that does to my results. I go 133 to 142. Again, if we're pretending that that number was 33, jumping 33 to 42 is another additional ten articles almost, which is really good for my research. The other way that you can broaden out to search is using the term OR. Right now I am searching for the phrase "critical pedagogy", but some educational articles are going to talk about critical theory and education. And they're really talking about the same concept, they're just using a different term. You might need to think about things that are synonymous with what you're using. E.g. if you are studying the group of Native Americans you might also want to search American Indians. If you were studying English language learners, you might also want to search for English as a second language. I'm going to come in here and I'm going to add "critical theory" as another search that it can look for. But I don't want it to find both "critical pedagogy" and "critical theory", I want it to find one or the other. Then it's very important that I tell the computer which terms to choose between. I do that with parentheses. Now you can see that my search is going to look for "critical pedagogy" with any of the educat* truncated terms or "critical theory" with any of the educat* truncated terms. But I do not have to find both "critical pedagogy" and "critical theory" in my results. This again, is to broaden your results out to find more articles. I move from 142 results to 215. Will you ever use all of these tricks in one search? Probably not, because we're either trying to narrow or we're trying to broaden back up. If you're trying to narrow, use more terms in your search bar because the more words you use, the fewer the results you will get. Or use the NOT eliminator. If you are trying to broaden your search back up, then use the truncation where you take a word, cut it off at a trunk, and use an asterisk to allow it to branch out to all endings. Or use the term OR with the parentheses so that the computer knows which terms to choose between when it's looking for results. Once you have a good list of results, then you can find the article that looks most promising to you. Some articles will be full text available in this database. Other articles, you may have to follow the magical breadcrumbs to find. I'm going to click on the second article here. I'm going to read the abstract first because the abstract is a nice summary of what's going on in the full article and these articles tend to be lengthy. So read the abstract first and save yourself some time. If the abstract is on topic, so will the full text be. If the abstract is not on topic, neither will the full text be. Move on to your next result. In this case, since I have no Pdf full text option on the page, I'm going to follow the find it at UCO button. When you do this, it takes you back into the library's website where I see that the full text of this article is available and I can view it by going through Proquest Central or the database Ebscohost Academic Search Premier. If you ever come back in and it says check availability, not to worry! We can still get that article for you if you request it through our interlibrary loan system, which is free for you to use. If you have questions about interlibrary loan or anything else that I've covered today, you can always reach out to the library for help. Here are the ways to get in touch. We have an information desk on the first floor where we are available. You can schedule an appointment with me or one of my colleagues. And this is super helpful because then we can do all these tricks and tips with your specific topic. You can also call us, email us, search our FAQs, text us, or chat all hours that the library is open. So there are lots of ways to get help if you need it. I'll be back with another video to cover the ESFR 5013 course guide, which is going to show you how to find the right databases for the topics that you're researching. In the meantime, if you need me, please reach out. I would love to hear from you and hear about what it is that you're interested in. Good luck with this semester.
ESFR 5013 Research Tips
From Christine Edwards May 31, 2023
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