Page 113 - DLIS006_INFORMATION SOURCES AND SERVICES

Information Sources and Services

Notes
2. Direct correspondences with authors found in the above processes for additional
information or studies that they may have been involved with or know of.
3. Wider internet searches for sources of “grey literature” (Government, educational
and other institutional reports, research organisation sites, conference proceedings
and papers, dissertations, etc.).
Performing a pilot search for studies to include in the author’s meta-analysis, it was found
that the methods generally described by other researchers or detailed in many texts or
papers on the topic required further development. Most electronic search strategies
described or suggested used single words or short phrases. Attempting to use this strategy
for the authors topic with a variety of databases generally produced thousands of matching
studies with the majority being unsuitable. The sheer numbers produced effectively made
working through their abstracts impossibly unproductive.
Application of the Filter to a Range of Databases
The filter needed to be easily adapted to a range of databases. The approach taken was to
focus on the use of the ‘search all text in all documents’ field. Most databases encountered
by the researcher contained this or an equivalent field. Alternately the filter can be used
for a search on ‘Title and abstract only’ but where available the full text search increased
the number of studies found. The filter was designed to be used within these fields on a
singular basis rather than using a variety of fields in one database and then having to
make adjustments depending on field availability in other databases. The only other field
required was the ‘date range’, which was used to delimit the searches to the years 1995 to
2007.

Figure 1: Generalist search databases such Google Scholar accept the filter directly.
(Though appearing truncated above, the whole filter fits within the first field)

Contd....

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