Final Project Post 4

This week I tried some new search techniques. First, I tried searching fields. This began by searching the KW Identifiers Field in ERIC. I tried to search "credibility AND adult AND online" with all fields set to KW Identifiers. To my surprise this produced no results. I was only able to produce results when searching for just one term in this field and results were fairly limited. I decided to try something different. Next I searched "credibility" in the SU Descriptors (subject descriptors) field and "online" in all fields. Through this method I found three articles I ended up taking a second look at, including one that made it to my list of potential articles:

Metzger, M.J., Flanagin, A.J., Zwarun, L. (2003) College student web use, perceptions of information credibility, and verification behavior. Computers & Education, 41, 271-290.

Having sifted through many results, I had some new ideas for keywords I wanted to try out. These included "truth," "trust," "evaluating," "validity," "information source*," and "web." Since there were variations on these that also might be useful (for example, "trustworthiness" or "evaluation") I was also eager to try out truncation. Next, I tried "cred* AND students AND information source* AND Internet OR Web." I also limited my results to only search Journal Articles and Peer Reviewed articles. This proved to be a very productive search, resulting in the following articles making it to my list:

Van de Vord, R. (2010). Distance students and online research: Promoting information literacy through media literacy. The Internet and Higher Education, 13(3). 170-175.

Rhoades, E.B., Irani, T., Telg, R., & Myers, B. (2008). Internet as an information source: Attitudes and usage of students enrolled in a college of agriculture course. Journal of Agricultural Education, 49(2).

Iding, M., Crosby, M., Auernheimer, B., & Barbara Klemm, E. E. (2009). Web site credibility: Why do people believe what they believe?. Instructional Science, 37(1), 43-63.

Next, I tried "Internet AND 'information literacy' AND students NOT elementary NOT 'high school'". I had shied away from searching "information literacy" since I felt it was too broad a term and not quite what I was investigating. Though numerous, my results confirmed this. Many were prescriptive rather than investigative and focused on a set of information literacy activities much broader than what I was interested in. Nonetheless, I identified two more potential articles:

Halverson, K.L., Siegel, M.A., & Freyermuth, S.K. (2010). Non-Science majors' critical evaluation of websites in a biotechnology course. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 19(6) 612-623.

Yarmey, K. (2011). Student information literacy in the mobile environment. EDUCAUSE Quarterly, 34(1).

As I look towards wrapping things up things, I hope to identify a few more articles through more searches. Then I will begin reviewing them for relevance and usefulness in answering my research question. Hopefully a few themes will emerge for my hypothetical literature review and I will have a good set of articles to use. I am a little confused about whether we are allowed to use more than one database for this project, but if so, I think this will be very useful in finding more articles, particularly since my topic extends from the education field into communications. (Since one would feel free to in a real literature review I would assume so, but I will check to make sure!)

For now, I am going to start annotating some of my clear "winners." :)