A student’s guide to searching the literature using online databases

Abstract

A method is described to empower students to efficiently perform general and literature searches using online resources. The method was tested on undergraduate and graduate students with varying backgrounds with scientific literature. Students involved in this study showed marked improvement in their awareness of how and where to find accurate scientific information.

The diffusion of H-related literature

“…Narukawa and Torra (2009) introduced a generalised fuzzy integral and described how such multidimensional integrals can be used for citation analysis. Miller, Chabot, & Messina (2009) described a method to "empower students to efficiently perform general and specific literature searches using online resources". Wilson, Proches, & Braschler (2007) analysed the biodiversity of science in the context of the interest of society and explored how the choice of organism study was influenced by societal interests.…”

Systematically retrieving research in the digital age: Case study on the topic of social networking sites and young people’s mental health

“…While young information searchers display a familiarity with computers, ‘they rely heavily on search engines … [They] view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web’ [31, p. 290]. Learning appropriate database searching techniques has been shown to produce more relevant articles in a shorter period of time, evidencing its growing importance [32]. Whilst it might be difficult to uncover every single piece of published work ever penned regarding a particular topic, one should nevertheless be able to describe and defend the rigour of the process by which literature was sought for a review.…”

Information literacy in adult returners to Higher Education: student experiences in a university pre-entry course in a UK university

“…Jansen, Spink and Saracevic, 2000;Lazonder, 2000;Nicholas, Huntington, Williams and Dobrowolski, 2006), and attempts have been made to develop methods to improve matters (e.g. Lucas and Topi, 2005;Miller, Chabot and Messina, 2009;Walton and Hepworth, 2011).…”