PSYCINFO or SOCINDEX -- Module 4

Search Terms: Information Literacy and Social Media 

Search Terms: “Information Literacy” and Social Media and

Student 

Search Term Results for "information literacy" in the Thesaurus

Search with Thesaurus term "information seeking" 

Database Comparison

Database Comparison	PsycInfo Database	SOCIndex Database
STRATEGY	Broad search: Information Literacy	Broad search: Information Literacy; Narrowed search: Information Literacy and social media; Information Literacy and social media and student.
REFINEMENTS	Information Literacy and Social Media; 2. Information Literacy and Fake News	Refined with controlled language to “information literacy” and social media and student
BEST HITS	Information Literacy and student yielded 300 hits and many of the headlines seemed like articles that could be of use to the research.	“information literacy” and social media and student.  40 results
CONTENT THING YOU LEARNED	The content of this database seems to be more advanced and scientific compared to SOCIndex.  I feel that this database is geared more toward subject matter experts.	I found the thesaurus to be helpful in coming up with other terms to use for the search. I found this database to have more variety of content in regard to the expertise in the subject.
SEARCHING THING YOU LEARNED	I like the idea of having a personal account to save searches and create alerts to manage your research.  I like that you can search a specific journal and add items to your favorites.  I didn’t like how I was unable to  remove tor clear he results from previous searches.  This database has numerous ways to narrow yoru search but I think it would be important to do a training on the features of the database so that you could make the most of the database features to yield the best results.	Overall I like the interface of this database.  It seems more user-friendly than the OVID PsycInfo database.
REFLECT ON HOW THE SEARCH WENT	I have to be careful with this search with the word information literacy because there are a lot of documents that get pulled just for the word information and just for the word literacy.  So it is very important to use quotes around the word “information literacy”.	The search and results in this database were much easier to navigate.