Tag Archives: Journal

Journal on Library vs Internet.

I performed a search for “data brokers” using Google and a couple of relevant results did float to the top.  I had to sift through a lot of questionable websites because they didn’t have an author or too strong of a bias, which brought their credibility into question. Another reason I doubted their credibility was because they weren’t really backing up their statements with any data or research.   While on the other hand when I used EBSCO there was less skepticism on my part when looking at the results, mainly because a lot of creditable information floated to the top.  While using EBSCO I did refine the search by adding privacy to one of the subject fields to make the search more specific.  I did find about a couple similar articles between the internet search and the library database search but about two of the results had a pay wall while using the internet search engine, the library database search allowed me to bypass a couple of pay walls since it was linked to the school’s account.

A Scholarly Google.

On Monday we used Google Scholar, while using Google scholar I tried a simple search for my topic and it turned up several results that I did not see in a regular Google search.  Google scholar also showed me citations that I in turn used to track down the full articles.  I also used EasyBib to store some of the locations for the articles and journals that I found, EasyBib did also allow me to evaluate some of the websites addresses by telling me whether the website was credible or not.  Google Scholar was nice to use but I still prefer the likes of EBSCO and Lexis Nexis academic, maybe it’s because I have spent a little more time with them but I like the way they let you narrow your search so you can choose from journals, newspaper articles to just court cases.

Journal on Topic.

The first difficulty that I encountered was that I did not know what topic to choose for my research.  I even looked through some of the previous readings that we were assigned for some inspiration.  After I finally got a grasp on what I wanted my topic to be the next problem was coming up with the question.  The main problem was that my question seemed too open ended and Reading chapter 2 & 3 of Badke helped somewhat with that problem. One question I have about the assignment is how recent should our sources be? so that I can know what time frame to search.