Читать книгу The Research Experience - Ann Sloan Devlin - Страница 66

Scheduling a session with a staff member in your library can acquaint you with the tools that will maximize your search efforts. Library professionals are there to assist students, and not infrequently students find such staff members more approachable than the course professor. Some institutions have a designated library liaison for a department or group of departments. Course instructors can invite such staff members to class at the beginning of the semester to explain useful search techniques and how to set up special accounts, such as those used to borrow materials from other institutions (e.g., interlibrary loan, ILL). With that introduction to the library liaison in class, students may be more willing to follow up with individual appointments.

Description

Figure 2.7 Graph in Scopus Showing Number of Documents Related to Search Term “Residence Hall” by Year

Source: Copyright © 2019 Elsevier.

Regarding maximizing search efforts, useful terms to understand are truncation, advanced searching, cited by, and analyze search results. In a database, a truncation tool, often an asterisk (*), may be added to the root of a word to capture multiple endings of the word. This approach will help you broaden your search to capture closely related words. MIT has a useful guide to using truncation (http://libguides.mit.edu/c.php? g=175963&p=1158679), and its website on this topic shows that using a truncation approach with the word “child*” could also produce childs, children, childrens, and childhood, all of which might be useful. An asterisk (*) is the truncation tool in PsycINFO. In Advanced Search (staying with PsycINFO as our platform), you have the opportunity to refine or limit your results. You could do so with many different parameters, including age groups, publication type, whether peer reviewed, methodology (you might be interested only in empirical studies), supplemental materials (e.g., 3-D modeling images), and so on.

A very useful function is the “times cited in this database” option (in PsycINFO) or “cited by” (in Scopus, another useful database). This option tells you what other published research (in that database) has cited the particular article you selected. This information is very helpful if you pick an article that may have been written 10 or more years ago and you want to see who has referenced it (and possibly does related work on it) recently. Scopus also has the nice feature of showing you the publication pattern in a particular topic, that is, how many articles dealing with a particular topic were published in a given year. In that way, you can see the ebb and flow of interest in a topic. For example, if you enter the search term “residence hall*” in Scopus, you see 860 documents (in June 2019). If you click on the option “analyze search results,” it will produce a graphic representation as well as a frequency count of the number of articles published on that topic (in this case, from 1855 to the present) (see Figure 2.7).

You can see that there was some interest through the 1970s and 1980s (related to the beginning interest in environment-behavior research), but that there has been a fairly steady increase in publication on the topic since the late 1990s. In 2014, 38 articles on this topic were published, but this was down from 44 in 2013. It will be interesting to see whether this area is declining in interest. In contrast, if you put in the search term “student anxiety” (June 2019), you get 22,591 “hits.” When you analyze the search results, you learn that 1,289 articles on the topic were published in 2014, with a dramatic increase of interest in the topic starting around the year 2000. Graphically, such information from Scopus shows the number of published resources that are available and the level of interest in the topic.