Information Literacy and Database Search Activity

Introduction

            Academic research and writing is characterized by an extensive information search and referencing. Therefore, the ability to search and locate information is an essential part in conducting any research work.

Home care research

In my research about home care I found resourceful journal articles from online databases. These articles were in the Home health care nurse journal and the American journal of nursing. The articles’ citations are as follows:1. Iris, S. (2010).  Home Care Today: The use of continuous glucose monitoring system in the home health setting. Journal of Home care and hospice professional, volume 28, issue 25, pp263-320. 2. Kathe, O. (2010). Diabetes under Control: Improving hospital care for patients with diabetes. The American Journal of Nursing, volume 110, issue 6, pp 65-69.  My research strategy incorporates the use of resources that contain material related to the topic of study. In this case I chose databases that contained information related to the medical field. This narrows my research to a specific resource pool that is likely to contain material that I wanted. Therefore, I chose databases whose content is restricted to the medical field. The used databases were The Cochrane Library and Medline Plus database. The choice of these databases was based on the fact that they specialize on the medical field content. The search in the databases was based on key words that featured in my topic. These words included home health care and home care nursing. Database tutorials teach about the use and creation of databases.

While reviewing a database tutorial I learned that most data access is done by the use of queries that identify the required information. These queries set parameters that limit the search of data to certain parts of the storage file. Therefore, well structured queries are likely to give the correct, desired information. I also learned that most online databases are dynamic in nature because their content is stored in databases but not files. Database driven websites have a content management system (CMS) where content developers log in to add content. Therefore, it acts as an administration area (‘Databases’, 2010). The use of the thesaurus assisted in offering suggestions of words that could make my search faster and efficient. The suggested words included palliative care, home health aide and personal care attendant. These words could be used in the search to lead to relevant material that contains information about homecare. This is because the words are related to the topic and could be used in a search query as parameters of the search.

Boolean logic uses three logical operators in any search of content. These operators include and, or and not. The search using an ‘and’ operator selects all content that contains two of the stated parameters in a search. For example in this research I would define a search using an ‘and’ operator by a search statement such as ‘home care and palliative care’. This statement would search for content having all the two parameters leaving out content that has only one of the parameters. The use of an ‘or’ operator restricts the search to content that has one of the parameters but excludes that which has both parameters. For example, the search statement ‘home care or palliative care’ would yield content which contains either of the words. The ‘not’ operator yields content that does not contain any of the stated parameters. At times these logical operators can be used in combinations to restrict and define a search criterion. Therefore, in this research I can restrict a search to the stated parameters by using the logical operators to state the desired content and the non-desired content (Kantor, 2002).

In order to increase my database research skills I will need to learn how to define search criteria so as to obtain the correct information. Secondly, I will need to learn how to select the words that would yield the appropriate or closely related material in my searches. Relevant statistics for this research include the number of home care centers and capacity per area in relation to the population that requires home care. This helps in determining sufficiency of the home care centers. Other statistics would include the number of home care patients by age categories. The Library of Congress virtual reference shelf contains a list of links that are categorized according to the type of subjects they cover. These links lead to further sites that contain information in a specific field. These sites can be searched for information on the topic by typing in a search statement that yields articles with relevant information. In this case my search is under the health and medical category. Under the category there is a link that leads to the National library of medicine which can be searched by typing a search statement.

References

‘Databases’ (2010). Database tutorials: Database driven websites. Retrieved from, http://www.quackit.com/database/tutorial/database_driven_website.cfm, on 27^thMay 2010.

Kantor, J. (2002). Boolean Operators. Retrieved from, http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/21stcent/lbool.html, on 27^th May 2010.

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