As
a part of my English course I had to do this exercise from The
Curious Researcher.
The
exercise consisted of searching databases on an ever more-focused
scale and then putting the results in a bibliographic format.
The
first search engine I used was Bing, and after a moderate length of time I found a
useful article:
"Forests." Scientific
Facts on.
GreenFacts Initiative, n.d. Web. 28 Mar. 2014.
<http://www.greenfacts.org/en/forests/ind
The
next place I searched was HotBot and once again found an article
without too much trouble:
Next
I searched Dogpile and the search took a tad longer but I ended up
with a good article:
Lastly
I used Noodletools.com to find a site and this was by far the hardest
to find a relevant article:
Lindsey,
Rebecca. "Tropical Deforestation : Feature Articles." Tropical
Deforestation : Feature Articles.
N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Mar. 2014.
<http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Deforestation
The
process was a very informative process for me because I learned how
to use other search engines that I had not used before, but more than
that the exercise gave me several good sources. I was however dismayed at the length of time it took to complete this.
Noah, sorry to hear your were dismayed! So, to clarify were you troubled by the amount of time it took relative to the fruits of your labor? Or were you generally satisfied with the quantity and quality of what you found but just wish it hadn't taken so long?
ReplyDeleteAs you probably realize, new processes generally require a learning curve that slows us down. But, I imagine if you returned to these same search engines again, you'd find the process somewhat faster because you now know how to use them.
But on an even broader scale, I'm not convinced shortcuts exist for good research. In my experience, effective research always takes time.