Help Researching Articles - I'm terrible at it

[h1ff]

Hi All,

 

I'm taking a brief break from the paper I'm writing to ask for advice.

 

I'm a graduate student in a Human Factors Psychology program, and I wanted to ask for tips/tricks on finding articles/past research, because I'm simply terrible at it!

 

For example: I wanted to find some articles on feedback interventions that lead to a quicker aquisition of exepertise, but searches in both google scholar and my university library bring up NOTHING I'd consider relevant.

 

I'll take any suggestions or overall tips on using search engines to find relevant articles, no matter how rudimentary you may think it is. I'll welcome any suggestion.

 

If there's a good online resource with suggestions, I'd welcome that too.

Edited October 25, 2009 by h1ff
Misspelling

[CharonY]

I am not familiar with psychology databases (with the exception of those that are also present in pubmed). With regards to keywords it is usually helpful to look if there is a specific term describing what you need. As I am not familiar with the subject I would start with "feedback intervention" get a couple of reviews and try to work backwards from there.

[GDG]

I do a fair amount of literature and patent searching as part of my job. In terms of search strategy, I first try to think of terms that are "characteristic" or specific to the topic you're trying to retrieve. Start by determining if you have a "term of art", i.e., a name or phrase that is used specifically (and, ideally, only) by the professionals in the field you are searching. I suspect that both "feedback" and "intervention" are widely used terms, across numerous fields. For example, if you google "feedback", you'll get references to (I assume) acoustics, music, circuitry, biofeedback, automation, counseling, etc. To narrow your search down from a billion to something relevant, try to think of a term that would be used in your field that is not used commonly in the others. Like, you might expect the term "gestalt" to appear pretty much only in your field, and not in circuit design or acoustics, etc. (I'm not saying that "gestalt" will help in this particular search: just trying to think of a term that might be semi-unique to psych.)

 

Not knowing any psych databases, I would start with PubMed.

 

Think of all of the available/searchable literature as forming a set, which you are going to filter down to a target subset of a size that can be examined by inspection.

• Your first filter is to figure out the terms that should appear in your target subset. If your terms are pretty much unique to your inquiry, you may be done at this point.
  
• Let's assume that the first filter narrowed the set down to something like 10^5 articles. Your second filter should be designed to eliminate those articles that likely have nothing to do with your inquiry (e.g., carving out all the circuits, acoustics, etc.). If you are being swamped by only one or 2 other fields (e.g., if circuit design frequently used "feedback intervention", and most of the search results involved circuits), you might try excluding a common circuit design term. Probably not "resistance", as that might also exclude relevant articles, but perhaps something like "voltage" or "microphone" would serve. Alternatively, you add a search term that is pretty specific to your field (if not to the subject of the inquiry). Perhaps "pedagogy" or something of the sort.
  
• You should have good results after the second filter. Obviously, if you end up with zero, you need to relax the filter a bit (or check the spelling of your search terms ). If you managed to narrow it down to articles mainly in the correct field, but still have too many to inspect, try to find the review articles in the bunch, and start tracking down the footnote references.
  

Hope this helps