Right now I'm working on an exercise where students bring a list of 10 search results into the library session. They break into groups and, as a group, discuss how they found relevant resources (which databases, search methods, etc.) Then, as a group, they report back to the class which methods of "sifting through the list" were most effective. The discussion was great, but the prof said the students didn't really apply what they learned to their papers. Do you have any sort of exercises specifically around that, getting students to not just pick 5 journal articles but pick the 5 *most relelvant to the paper*? - Amandadon't

Hmm. That's an interesting question to which I have no nice neat answer. I think for me, I try and emphasize that they aren't slotting in the five "most relevant articles." They are working through a process in which they are choosing ideas and opinions that they want to engage with, or they are finding evidence to support or refute a claim. So if the idea is interesting and they have something to say in response, the article is relevant. If the evidence is interesting and convincing (or flawed and worth picking apart) it's relevant. - Steele Lawman

But. If I needed to devise an exercise closer to what you seem to be looking for, I'd talk about how a librarian reads a citation. What can you deduce from all the different bits of information you get in a citation? How do things like publication date, number of pages, name of the journal help you? At what point do you have to RTFA to know if it is relevant? What is your minimum measure of relevance that will drive you to the stacks, or to skimming the PDF, or filling out the ILL request. (Sorry if this isn't helpful, but your question has been helpful to me, if that's any consolation!) - Steele Lawman

Present them with 6 articles and a topic. Three of which are *the best* Then have a competition to see who can figure out which ones those are. seems like it might be a good idea to have categories and a rating system to illustrate bestness. - Jason - The Opaque from Android

That is the question. Seriously, we suck at this. Want lots? HERE! Want less? Uh ... here's lots. - barbara fister

I'm having an information literacy crisis of faith. - barbara fister

I talk about discipline / domain specifics where I can- get them to look at terminology, methodology, links to other papers... - Pete #TeamMonique

Also get them always to consider 'what is my question', step back from papers from time to time. - Pete #TeamMonique

In medicine, it's often the population, quality of the study design, specific intervention, etc., and whether that is relevant to what the requester is thinking about. Here, we do filtered summary packets for docs where we are selecting just a few of what seem to be the best articles and provide summary of the key points and issues. So maybe try to focus on some pretty specific questions, have a list of results from a general search, and have them work through trying to find the articles that seem to best answer those questions. - Rachel Walden

We've got Summon, so "Want lots? HERE! Want less? TICKY-BOXES!" (Almost literally - was given 15 measly minutes to cover everything they need to know for their first research assignment ever, don't get me started.) - Deborah Fitchett

Barbara, I'm less bothered than you are, I guess because I think this is where the intellectual work really comes in. While I do like to come up with some quick heuristics, I think at some point the answer is just "read them and think about them in relation to what you want to say." Or "stop searching the databases and talk to some people who know something about this topic and take careful notes on what they think is relevant." - Steele Lawman

I love this thread. I may go rogue on some hapless "How to find journal articles in an EBSCO database" class someday and implement one of these lesson plan ideas, because they sure as hell would be more interesting and more useful than me telling the students, yet again, about date limiters. - Catherine Pellegrino

^^^^ this. What we do as we organize information has frankly not that much to do with how people make meaning. But I feel I should do something to acknowledge that the library's tools are a teeny piece of what has to happen. And that this is an area where what we provide - LOTS! and even ticky boxes - doesn't do the work that has to be done. We make it seem as if searching databases and choosing what you'll use is research. - barbara fister

Also, this is where I'm coming from - maybe we should be thinking more about filtering than finding - http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012... - barbara fister

"We make it seem as if searching databases and choosing what you'll use is research." Yes, let's stop doing that. - Steele Lawman

I saw a new tool some clever grown-up college students created that not only can be used to store notes and create citations, it lets you line up your cut-and-paste quotes in a document so that you can handily fill in the transitional sentences. Voila! your paper is done! That's the problem, right there. - barbara fister

Not that we created it, but we too often enable it. - barbara fister

That's fascinating. It reminds me that I have video interview footage of a professor's notes where she has copied-and-pasted quotes and citations (some of it still retaining our library catalog's formatting) into a Word document. So again, it's not the initial practice that's a problem (because I have reasonably high confidence my colleague is doing good research and writing), but what happens around those practices. Too much student research and writing is half-baked. - Steele Lawman

You are all awesome, and this is totally helping me think through my goals here, circling around teaching students how to deal with abundance rather than scarcity. "Filtering" exactly. I want to say to students "Oh, you found a big list of search results? Whoopdee-do, I can find a big list of results, too. Now what?" I also take Steve's point about needing to address the ideas within articles, and that a research project is a process. Maybe asking them questions like "why *didn't* you choose certain articles, and did you learn anything from the articles you didn't select?" - Amandadon't

I should mention, too, this is for a first-year class, although often when I think my upper-level classes will require a different approach they need as much review as new "advanced" techniques. - Amandadon't

Yes, I quite like "how to deal with abundance rather than scarcity" as a goal. - Steele Lawman

Ooh, ooh! I have a metaphor, but I don't know if it will resonate with 18 year olds: doing a literature search is like conducting a search for someone to work with you Your database search is the job description, and if you make it too general, every idiot will send you his resume. Make it too specific, and you have described a person who only exists in Latvia and he's dead. The citations and abstracts are the resumes. You can tell if they look like they might be a good fit, make some snap judgements about who looks interesting, who looks boring, who is phoning it in, and who is just out of your league. Then when you read the articles, you are conducting the interview. Do you really want to spend a lot of time with this person? When you ask questions of the text, are the answers interesting, or do they uncover more interesting questions? And then when you are actually writing the paper, the sources are your colleagues. - Steele Lawman

If nothing else, students seem to get it when you quote Doug Downs: "sources are people talking to people." I also sometimes use the metaphor of choosing expert witnesses to testify on behalf of your idea, though that makes it all sound like winning is the goal, which it isn't. (You should be open to withdrawing your claim if an expert witness says you got nuthin' whereas most lawyers will just go get another expert.) - barbara fister

Yeah, and you want all your witnesses to agree on the stand, while you want your sources (often) to disagree usefully. - Steele Lawman

More like detectives trying to figure out what happened based on the evidence before handing it over to the DA who just wants to get a conviction. - barbara fister

Just wanted to say that I love this particular thread. Some of my colleagues would respond to a long list of results with MOAR BOOLEAN until you get a small set of results. My metaphor is "if you are lost, turn to someone you trust for direction." So the answer I *want* to give is, narrow down the results with using the names of publications that you already trust (as this is what I tend to do) -- but this answer admittedly doesn't really work for undergraduates. - copystar

Obligatory Pegasus Librarian post, this time being "Know Your Results Before You Search": http://pegasuslibrarian.com/2007... Particularly this bit: "We move back to the result lists and figure out how to leverage a 'messy' keyword search by analyzing the results, quickly opening anything that looks remotely relevant, and gleaning search terms that way." I often say "I know nothing about this topic, so I'm going to do a really dumb search first, and will figure out how to make a better one later if I have to." - Steele Lawman

I'm wondering if I can take Steve's job search metaphor and re-work it using online dating: if you make your personals ad to general, every idiot will send you his resume; make it too specific, and you've described a person who only exists in Latvia and he's dead. - Amandadon't

Yes, I was thinking about the online dating angle, too. - Steele Lawman