EDL 740: Philosophies of Inquiry

You want to find:

• a grounded theory dissertation
• related to assessment 
• in elementary school

We will craft the search using FOUR separate searches:

• Search 1: grounded theory
• Search 2: assessment
• Search 3: elementary school
• Search 4: Combines S1 AND S2 AND S3

We will build our search one concept at a time and then use ‘search history’ to combine separate concepts. This allows you to test different combinations of the concepts to find the best set of articles for your needs (maybe S1 AND S3, or S2 AND S3 would give us a better set of results).

Boolean operators such as AND & OR are used to connect synonyms & concepts.

• Use OR to connect synonyms to appropriately expand your search for a concept. Your search results will contain citations for each term. Place parentheses around the search terms when you use OR so that the database searches them together. 
• Use AND to connect concepts. This will narrow your search results, giving you just the articles that include all terms, that is, the intersection of the search terms you've used. Remember: 
• Always capitalize boolean operators; if you don't, they'll be ignored in some databases.

Once you have identified your concepts, the next step is to add synonyms for each concept. Synonyms are important because a relevant article might use different words than your original concept terms. Think back to our main concepts (or key words) in step 1:

grounded theory, assessment, elementary school

There are likely many more relevant articles that use slightly different words for each concept. To find those additional results, you will need to include synonyms combined with OR. For example:

• assessment OR test* 
• elementary school OR primary school OR K-5

If your keyword search returns too many irrelevant articles, you may need to modify your search by using phrases. Phrase searching limits your results to articles containing an exact phrase, as opposed to keywords scattered throughout the title, abstract, author, or journal fields. Adding double quotes around a set of words will turn them into a phrase.

  ex. grounded theory vs. "grounded theory"

The search process is iterative! After running an initial search and skimming through the results, you may discover new keywords to include or see that one of your keywords is pulling in irrelevant results. You may also realize that you need to break out an additional concept from your research question or find that your concepts need to be combined in a different way.

It is helpful to keep track of all of the search terms that you have used during your search process in order to create the most comprehensive search and to allow the search to be run again at a later time. If you plan to publish the results of your literature review, you may also need to include a section on your search methodology.

Choosing the "right" search for the job depends on how comprehensive the search needs to be and how much time you have to review results.