This guide contains a range of free useful resources that you can use for your school studies. It also provides information on a range of tools such as 'Google Scholar' and 'Trove' that you can use for free when doing research for school.
If you have any questions or queries please don't hesitate to contact me.
Different sources can be used for different purposes. Some such as Blogs and Wikipedia may be useful to give you background information to help you gain an understanding of your topic but it will not be acceptable as a reference to support your assignment.
For students studying at Senior Secondary level finding peer-reviewed/scholarly journal articles are very important. Why??? When using information to support your argument or viewpoint you need to ensure what you are using is from a credible sources. Peer reviewed journals are a credible, reliable source.
The Youtube clip below explains what a scholarly or peer reviewed source is.
A world of information is at your finger tips with the Internet. Struggling through a million or more search results is time consuming. Planning your search before you use a database will help you to locate information relevant to your topic in a timely manner. Identifying key concepts, the use of phrasing, understanding truncation and boolean operators will ensure relevant results when conducting a search on a database.
Identifying the key concepts and related issues relevant to your topic is the first step in developing a search strategy. What are you really researching, what topics, concepts, ideas do you need to find out about?
Example: How is technology being used in early childhood settings?
Key Concepts/ideas/issues: technology, early childhood, use of. Need to research how/what technologies are being used in early childhood settings.
After identifying your key concepts/ideas/issues brainstorm potential keywords and synonyms to use when you undertake your search. Dictionaries and thesaurus are useful tools. Be aware of different terminology in different countries if you are not limiting your search to Australia (eg. college is used in America)
Example: How is technology being used in early childhood settings?
Keywords: technology, early childhood, use
Synonyms:
Using quotation marks around phrases will keep the words together when undertaking a search. No quotation marks will mean searching the phrase as single words.
Example 1: early childhood (no quotation marks but searching for the phrase early childhood)
You will get more results but they may not be relevant to "early childhood".
Example 2: "early childhood" (using quotation marks around the phrase)
You will get less results using "quotation marks" but they should be very relevant
TRUNCATION
Truncation allows you to search for all forms of a word. Placing a * at the end of your word allows for plurals of that word to be part of the search results.
Example: educat* will give results for educate, education, educating, educates
Most databases use the * with a few using the ?
Online databases connect keywords and phrases with the use of Boolean Operators. When using Boolean Operators AND, OR, NOT they can broaden or narrow your search.
AND
Using AND joins search terms together. Using AND will narrow your search results.Search strategy below will show results for early childhood and leadership.
OR
Using OR means that you will get either one OR the other in your search results. You can use OR in conjunction with your synonyms. Example below shows we are looking for early childhood OR kindergarten OR pre-school AND leadership. Results will have one of the synonyms and leadership.
NOT
Using NOT in a database search will exclude the word from your search results. NOT will reduce your search results. The example below will include early childhood and kindergarten but NOT preschool. The results will show either early childhood OR kindergarten AND leadership but NOT preschool.
