Perfecting My Search

Below, I have attached videos of the process I went through, using the EBSCOhost database, to find scholarly documents relating to inquiry learning, information/science literacy and primary science.

Initially, I narrowed my search by selecting databases (ERIC, Primary Search, eBook collection and Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA)) that I thought would contain relevant and suitable documents, based on the descriptions provided.  

For my first search I used the words inquiry AND information literacy AND primary education and was surprised to find only two results. One of the results related to science but not to the specific subject area I was interested in.

This prompted me to change my search from primary education to primary science. I was even more surprised that zero results were returned. I thought more carefully about the Boolean operators that I had used and realised that using AND twice meant that all of the words needed to appear in the document before it would turn up as a result.

This reflection prompted me to change my search terms to inquiry OR information literacy AND primary science, as I was interested in both inquiry learning and information literacy in primary science. This search returned 25,391 results, which I thought was a good starting point, but I needed to narrow the results further.

I decided to select only full text documents as abstracts were of no use to my research. Clicking the full text only button refined my results to 10,889. 

To reduce the results further I limited my search to publication dates between 2000 and 2011 to return current documents only. This resulted in 6,057 documents.

Looking through the results, I noticed that the words information literacy and primary science often appeared separately in the documents. I decided to use quotation marks around the words information literacy, as I wanted these words to appear together in the text. Surprisingly, this did not change the results and the words were still found separately in the documents. This was a strategy I had successfully used in other database searches.  I then tried placing primary science in quotation marks and again found no change in the results.

I was still unhappy with the results that had been returned as many documents were not relevant to the specific subject I was interested in.  I decided to change my search words slightly to see the impact on the results.  I removed the words primary and literacy and searched for inquiry OR literacy AND science. There was an increase in results up to 7,746.  By selecting the peer reviewed button, to ensure only scholarly documents were displayed I narrowed the results down to 3,784.

To find the most relevant documents I changed my Boolean operators both to AND. My final search using inquiry AND literacy AND science returned 71 results which was a manageable number of documents for me to search through successfully. 

Through my search process I realised the importance of Boolean operators and the need to try a variety of search terms in order to achieve desired results.