745 research presentation

Notas do Editor

1. Application: to come up with therapies for such individuals to better cope within their own experiences within their cultures/societies.
2. Jeannie’s concept map of her research.
3. Cleaned up version of her sketch.
4. Focused the question, simplified somewhat, from her original sketch.
5. Prof. Lester suggested that I help Jeannie learn how to better search the databases. She works at her school’s library, but does not know much about the databases.Informed her about concept of controlled vocabulary – she had an interesting take on the idea of ascribing stock terms for research considering her research was geared toward those individuals who may not self-identify with such terminology.After we came up with a solid question, I asked Jeannie to think of as many synonyms as she could for the scope of her research. I wanted to keep the initial search strategy somewhat simple, limited to three concepts.
6. Browsed the “Databases by Subject” page on the Dominican Library website and found several under “Psychology.” From class exercises, also knew that some in the “Social Sciences” like SocINDEX and Social SciSearch would be helpful. Searched Dissertations & Theses to see other research (if possible) on the subject
7. Most common descriptors between databasesSome from concept 2 had word (psychology) in parentheses; so the terms have a specific focus within the realm of psychological study, most likely why Jeannie picked those terms as synonyms.
8. Jeannie gave me a lot of synonyms, and sometimes I found several good descriptor matches, which made for some long and complex search strings. This is just the first concept.
9. Search strings for concepts two and three
10. Dialog makes it very easy to organize and combine complex search strings; easy to design your search just like your facet analysis.
11. HIV articles are not irrelevant; much of the research in these areas is focused on those with HIVWhile these American articles, particularly focusing on the African-American community are helpful, they aren’t exactly the types of articles Jeannie is looking forHad to add another facet to include non-Western subjects.
12. First two facets were fine, but the third was too widespread and pulling in a lot of hits that weren’t all that relevant. Replaced and refined the third facet to introduce non-Western and region-specific concepts. These did not show up as descriptors within the databases, so I did these as keywords. Truncated to get Middle East and Middle Eastern, and Asian as well as Asians.
13. I wanted to show this revised search to show how the Ebsco interface can be manipulated to act like Dialog, combining sets.
14. What did I learn? 1) By exploring the Ebsco interface and clicking on “search history” I discovered that you could use it to work similarly to Dialog in how different search sets are combined.2) Sometimes simple is better. Try pearl growing. I was so focused on my facet analysis that I almost forgot about trying other methods. 3) I jotted down Academic Search Premier as a possibility when going through all of the databases, but didn’t think it would be as good as PsychINFO or some of the other more specific databases, but it yielded more relevant results than any of the others.
15. Learn to be a better searcher herself, learn to use the thesauruses to find search terms.She had a tendency to only use full-text databases and click on full-text results; possibly ignoring relevant articles. Use the descriptors I included in the bibliography to see how they are used in a search. Find the best articles and figure out which descriptors worked best.