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ENGL 057 - Critical Connections in Reading and Writing - Allen-Gleed

Taking a Closer Look at Results

Evaluate the Results List

Some things you should take into account when looking at the result list are:

  • Whether or not the source is sufficiently academic for your needs.
  • If the author has adequate knowledge or experience on the topic about which they are writing.
  • If the date the source was published in an acceptable time frame.
  • Whether the information you are seeing matches what you want to find.
  • If you can get what you need.

Sufficiently Academic?

Looking at the record you can find out what kind of resource (in this example, it's a newspaper) it is, and the context in which your keywords are being used. This can give you a hint about whether or not the way they are talking about the topic is academic enough for your needs.

Closer look at the Authors

Sometimes it will tell you exactly what it is (for example, the article shown says "Research Article" at the top). It will also often give you a byline of the author that tells you some information about their educational background, employment, or expertise. 

Relevance -vs- Timeliness

Databases sort things by relevance by default. However, the most relevant things might not be the most recent. The third result in the search is from 2007, which if I'm only interested in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic is not relevant.

Quality of Results

You should be doing multiple searches, and trying different things! Maybe you applied some limiters that didn't work, or you find you need to adjust your keywords to get a different kind of source. If your results are not what you hoped or were looking for, try something different! I tried nearly 40 different searches before deciding what gave me the results I liked best!

Can you get it?

It doesn't matter how relevant an article is if it's not actually available to you. You can limit your search to full text, which will give you the results that have either a PDF or the article typed up in the database (HTML), or you can click the find it button to see if it's available in another database. If you have a lot of results, limit to full text. If you don't, remove that limiter and see what happens!