Transcript - Education Library Research Skills for the Capstone Part 2 - Mar 18 2020

Video Link: https://youtu.be/4HpiU-u50rs

 

Education Library Research Skills for the Capstone Part II – Search Strategies

 

Begin Transcript

 

Narration:

 

Kim: Welcome to tonight's webinar. This is the second webinar in the Education Library Research Skills for the Capstone series. My name is Kim Burton, and with me is Anne Rojas. Anne will be helping out answering all of your questions. We are the liaisons to the College of Education

 

All of this starts at the Education Research page in the Walden Library. If any of you has had an appointment with either Anne or myself, or if you have seen us at Residency, you are probably familiar with this page.  It's the starting off point for research in the field of Education here at Walden. 

 

I'm going to show you how to access it from the library website.  So, here we are at the Library website. Click on the Research by Subject blue button.  You'll get a drop-down list of all the programs we have at Walden, and we can just click on education. That will bring us to the Education Research page. Once you are here, bookmark it! You guys are probably going to be coming back here. We have a lot of resources on here. I can't go over all of them tonight, but I do want to point out a few things.

 

Over on the left-hand side, besides seeing the lovely pictures of Ann and my self, you will also find a couple different ways to get answers to your questions. Quick answers are the Library's frequently asked questions. If you have a question for the Library, someone has probably already asked that question, and, if they have, we probably have a quick answer. If you can't find an answer to your questions in Quick answers, you can click on Ask aA Librarian where you can email us, you can chat with us, if chat is open, or if you need a more detailed research appointment you can click on the doctoral appointments button to set up a half-hour appointment to meet with either Anne or myself. At this appointment, we will go over your research and your questions. This is a great service that we have here for you.

 

Anne:  Your audio is a little bit uneven.  I don't know if you can adjust anything to even it out? 

 

Kim:  Let me see.  Okay.  Can you hear me better now? 

 

Anne:  Yeah, that sounds better I think. 

 

Kim:  Sorry about that, everybody.  We're scrolling down to this box that says "research help."  This is where we have a lot of information from education research basics to the literature review and everything in between.  If you're going to residency, this is where you'll find the EdD residency or PhD library resources.  At the bottom we have an upcoming webinar dropdown menu.  The very bottom has a link to the slide presentation. 

 

This is tonight's session and this was two weeks ago.  That's just another place where you can find that.  I want to talk a little bit about our education databases.  We put these together to help you in your research.  Before I can go in and show you how to do a search, I have to talk to a little bit about Boolean operators.  These are terms databases understand.  They help to expand or narrow your results. 

 

They allow the databases to run complex search strategies and get focused and relevant results.  The first Boolean operator we will talk about is "and."  You'll get a smaller result pool using "and."  If we're looking for resources about student support and higher education, you'll only get the overlap.  You'll actually get fewer results.  The Boolean operator "or" will bring back more results. 

 

If you're looking for articles about higher education or college, you'll get the overlap and resources that only talk about higher education and resources that only talk about college.  We have to remember that databases are not the same as Google Scholar.  You can't just type in your topic in a sentence and get results.  In the databases, you need to break up your topic into concepts. 

 

Put one concept in each search box.  If our topic is "how do academic support programs contribute to the success of students in higher education?" what are our concepts?  The first one would be academic support programs.  Then, success of students, then higher education.  When we go to a database, we want to put one concept in each box. 

 

The databases are setup with those Boolean operators.  They have "and" in front of each of those boxes.  I want to demonstrate a search for you.  I'm going to go into Education Source.  This is a great database.  Here we have three boxes.  You can always add more if you need to, but you might not get as many results. 

 

Let's put one concept in each box.  We have academic support programs.  Next we have student success.  Then we have higher education.  Now we want to scroll down and limit our results.  We're going to uncheck full text.  Full text is great if you have a weekly assignment or discussion post and you need the resource right away.  You guys are searching for your capstone.  You want to find everything out there. 

 

Walden doesn't have everything.  You can also get some items we may not have access to but can find for you.  I know everybody is interested in the current literature.  Right now, we're searching for search terms.  I'm not going to limit to date because I can do that later on.  I want to limit to peer-review scholarly journals.  We got 33 results.  I want to use those to find more search terms so I get more results. 

 

I do that by looking in the titles and subject lines.  These are basically the terms the database has assigned to this article.  I notice they have educational support services.  I think that's probably the same as academic support programs.  This is where I will use the "or."  Since there's an "or" we should get more results.  We do.  We now have 254 results from 33. 

 

Some other ways we can get some search terms is we can brainstorm other terms for higher education like college or university.  Sometimes databases will come up with suggestions if you type "or."  You can put in as many terms as you want in one search box as long as they are all synonyms and they have the "or" in between them. 

 

These are all terms that mean "student success."  This article right here, I'll click on the title.  When you click on it, you'll get a detailed record.  You have access to the abstract.  You can see other terms that researchers are using.  One of their subject terms is "academic achievement."  This is a term we can put in here.  I didn't hit "search."  Now we'll hit "search."  Now we're getting a lot of results, over 1,000. 

 

We can brainstorm but the database is giving us some options.  I'm going with "college or university."  We have almost 5,000 results.  This is a lot of articles.  Definitely too many.  I think we really have searched comprehensively.  One thing that we didn't do is limit to date.  Sometimes older articles have search terms that are important.  This article is from March 2007.  That's too old.  Let's say it's very important.  It's really talking right on topic with what we want. 

 

The database has found other researchers that cite this article.  If I click on "times cited" it will bring me to the other articles that cited this.  You can see how you can use this to find more current research.  This one found two cited in 2016.  This one is from 2019 and this is from 2018.  This is helpful if you're looking for more current research. 

 

We want to focus these on articles we can actually use right now.  We can limit to date.  We're going to do that in this blue column on the lefthand side.  Let's put in 2017.  You never have to put in end date because it will search through the present.  Now we have 855 results.  This is still a lot of results. 

 

We can tell the database to search in a specific area of the article.  We can tell it we only want articles that talk about student success as a subject heading.  It will only bring back articles with these terms in the subject headings.  It narrowed it down to 482.  We can also say we only want articles that talk about college or university in the abstract. 

 

Now we have 116.  I recommend at this point you go over to this "share" button.  Down here there's a permalink.  Copy this and save it to a Word doc or notepad.  I don't know if you've been kicked out because your session timed out, if you have taken this link and saved it, all you have to do is paste it in the url.  It will ask you to sign back in but it will pull up that result list for you. 

 

The only thing it does is default back to full text.  You will want to uncheck that to get all the articles.  Another way to focus in on articles is by using the subject headings over here in the blue column.  Sometimes you can just click on the arrow next to it.  Click on "show more."  This is saying out of the 116 results, 54 have the subject tag "education." 

 

I can go through and say I only want articles that talk about academic support programs as a subject heading.  This is a way to go from 166 articles to 6 relevant articles focusing in on the academic support programs.  I can get back to my original results by going to the blue column.  The top part is your current search.  I can click on the "X" and it will bring me back to my original 116 results.  I can focus in on something else. 

 

When you have the results, when you click the title, it will bring you to a detailed record.  To access the article you're looking for the pdf full text or an html link or the "find at Walden" link.  I like to open it in a new tab.  It will bring you to a page and it will list all the databases where the article is located.  This article doesn't have a "find a Walden" or pdf link. 

 

It has nothing in here.  This is just the abstract.  If this is an important article for you to have, I recommend you copy the title or go over here to "cite" and copy the citation for it.  Then, go back to the library and click on "ask a librarian."  This banner goes across the top.  Either email it to us or if chat is open, send it to us that way.  We have a lot of tricks up our sleeve.  The articles could be hidden in another database, sometimes they're online for free. 

 

If we can't find it, we'll send you to the document delivery service.  You can request the article through this service.  You can click on the "Services" tab on the top banner.  In the box for "students" there is a link to the document delivery service.  It takes 7-10 days to get the document to you.  It will be sent in electronic format. 

 

You won't want to use this for a weekly assignment.  It's free for you, but we have a $55 price cap.  If it costs more than that, we will have to cancel your request.  Don't worry, we can still help you figure this out.  There is also a 30 article per lifetime limit.  I have only seen this come up a few times.  You have to sign in to DDS, set up an account, and then fill this out and submit it. 

 

Does anybody have questions about the search or the documentary delivery service? 

 

Anne:  So far so good. 

 

Kim:  That search that we just did was in one database.  You have to remember that you're not going to find everything about your topic searching in just one database.  You're also going to want to look in multidisciplinary databases.  These will have journals in a wide variety of disciplines.  If your topic is on education of student nurses, you'll want to look in nursing databases.  If you're talking about distance education, that has a lot of technical issues. 

 

You'll want to look in the technical and applied science databases.  I'll show you where you can find those.  Under research by subject on the library homepage, you can click on any of these other topics.  I think all of you should come here and search some psychology databases.  Psychology and education always overlap.  Success will have a lot to do with psychology.  You'll see this looks just like the education page. 

 

You also have the recommended databases you should be searching.  As I mentioned, if you're doing distance education or anything technical, you can go to the technology and applied science page and you'll find the databases we recommend.  Any questions? 

 

Anne:  We did get a question on the best way to find data on a subject.  Maybe you can show using data as a search term.  Keeping in mind there are other ways to do it too.  Kim can go through a quick example. 

 

Kim:  Let's say if we were looking for data or statistics, we can just add a row.  We can put some terms in here.  I can put in "statistics."  You'll see it's going to bring up some other terms about data, statistics, data analysis.  Since I added another search box with an "and" I will have fewer results.  It brought it down to 14.  You can see it has correlation and statistics in it.  Since I added an "or" we now have 22. 

 

You can go through and see what type of statistics these articles have.  Back at the Education Research page, if you scroll down to Research help, there's a dropdown on statistics and data.  These are links to other guides we have to help you search for them.  There's a bunch of links for you to use for more information.  If you're looking for datasets and you want to use some of these databases, Anne and I usually recommend reaching out to these entities directly. 

 

They will be able to help you search their own sites better than we would.  This is a link to the Database Search Skills guide that we have.  It goes over some of the things we talked about today.  I also want to go over the quick answers, ask a librarian, and capstone appointments.  From the education research page you can find all those on the lefthand side.  Anne and I both recommend you do the doctoral appointments through screen sharing and audio so we can walk you through searches. 

 

Of course, if you want to do it by phone, that's fine as well.  Those are 30 minute appointments where we can help you with your topic.  That is the end of this session, does anyone have any questions? 

 

Anne:  I'm going to add that if we didn't answer your question, I put the appointment link in the chat box.  We are about to enter slots for April so you can look for slots in April by the end of the week. 

 

Kim:  Great, thank you.  I'm going to stop the recording.  If anybody has some questions, we'll still be here for a few minutes. 

 

 

 

End Transcript

 

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