For my search in HighWire Press
1. The database that I choose for my first search was HighWire Press.
2. The terms that I entered were: Homosexual rights in the U.S.
3. I received 6561 results
4. I had a lot over 100 results so I made that I typed in ealier even more specific. The new terms that I typed were: homosexual rights in the U. S. including the military, marriage and adoption.
5. I got down to 404 results from the new terms. This was as close to making it to 100 results as I could. Then I started to look at the results and saw that they were meaningful, because most of the titles of the articles were very relevant to the terms that I entered.
6. The article that I chose was: Identities and Politics: Toward a Historical Understanding of the Lesbian and Gay Movement, Mary Bernstein, 2002, Social Science History Association.
7. I actually opened up the article and skimmed through the sections and fond that it was very meaningful, because it covered all of the things that I was searching for.
For my search in Academic Search Premier.
1. The terms that I entered were: Homosexuality ethics.
2. I recieved a total of only six results, however all but one article looked meaningful.
3. My results were narrow enough.
4. I noticed that this database has less articles than the first one I used, thus the search terms that I entered had to be more broad as opposed to more narrow from the first database.
5. I determined that the articles were meaniful by looking at their title and seeing how it related with my search terms.
6. The article that I chose and its information is: Homosexuality, Ethics and Identity Synthesis, Yarhouse, Mark A., Virginia Beach, Taylor & Francis Inc.
7. I found that this article is very meanigful, because I looked through the article and everything in it focused on the ethics of homosexuality.
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First, I'm delighted that you actually looked at the article content.
ReplyDeleteHighWire: I wonder about your search phrase: "homosexual rights in the U. S. including the military, marriage and adoption."
While you still have more results than around 100, I would still take out the 'little' words, e.g.
"homosexual rights"
AND "United States"
AND military
AND marriage
AND adoption
You might end up with more results, but you wouldn't miss articles that are phrased slightly differently. On the other hand, you might end up with fewer articles because your search isn't clouded with words such as "in" or "the."
Your evaluation through relevance is an important criterion, but it's also useful to remember that this database contains journals that are approved by High Wire and articles that are peer-reviewed by the journals. That creates authority.
Academic Search Premier (ASP): It's interesting to see that your results were far fewer in ASP. I just looked at someone else's blog and the results were exactly the opposite for his completely different topic. ASP had many more results than his High Wire search. You just never know. That's why you have to adjust as you go from database to database and topic to topic.