Course Description
Introduction to the types and the use of multiple academic databases. The course involves discussions of the storage and structure of information recorded in databases; the use of search tactics and strategies to optimize use of databases; and the types of databases that exist, including disciplinary and multi-disciplinary, journal and ebook, as well as databases that hold intermediary information, data and working papers, and supplementary information, multimedia. The course also includes an introduction to the methodology of systematic literature reviews, where students apply established methods to document a reproducible and rigorous literature review.
Course Objectives
Upon successful completion of this course, the student will:
Understand the basic principles of document storage and description.
Become familiar with information retrieval principles and search strategies.
Become familiar with the types of databases that exist and their uses.
Employ the above objectives in order to create a systematic, rigorous, and reproducible review of the literature.
Assignments
Short papers, 4 - 6 pages
Compare and contrast document records from three similar databases
Compare and contrast document collections from three similar databases
Compare and contrast search tactics from three similar databases
Extensive description of selected database
Long papers, 10 - 12 pages
Systematic review
Bibliometric analysis
Summary reflection, 3 pages
Students document changes in information retrieval behavior as a result of the course
Schedule
Week 1: introduction
history
landscape
vendors
open access
Week 2: storage
records (document surrogates, metadata, &c.)
descriptors (thesauri, controlled vocabularies, &c.)
full text, multimedia
Week 3: indexes and abstracts
Week 4: info retrieval
precision/recall, &c.
relevance
Week 5: info seeking:
search tactics
search strategies
codifying the search process
Week 6: online catalogs
InfoKat
WorldCat
Others
Week 7: bibliographic/citation databases
Web of Science
Scopus
Google Scholar
Week 8: multi-disciplinary and multi-format databases
EBSCOhost Databases
Proquest Databases
LexisNexis Academic
Week 9: reference databases
Week 10: disciplinary databases
Week 11: government databases
Week 12: ebooks
Week 13: data repositories
data.gov
datacite.org
re3data.org
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Week 14: institutional/subject repositories
OpenDOAR
ROAR (roar.eprints.org)
arXiv
SSRN, &c.
Week 15: digital libraries
dp.la, &c.
Readings to be organized
Khan, K. S., Kunz, R., Kleijnen, J., & Antes, G. (2003). Five steps to conducting a systematic review. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 96(3), 118-121. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC539417/
Notes from 8/4/2015 Meeting with Sarah Asher from the Office of eLearning:
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Course Syllabus Requirements
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I’ll send any suggestions in my syllabus review email
Learning Objectives
I’ll send any suggestions (if any) in my syllabus review email
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The URLs of the systems we discussed:
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Distance Learning Library
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