Discussion Question:
Pick one topic that you need references for to write your synthesis paper. (That paper was already written on OBESITY IN ADULTS)
Utilizing ProQuest, ERIC, and Google Scholar, please enter the one topic in the search box, evaluating the various features of the search engine. Which did you prefer? Explain why and discuss your experience navigating the three search engines. Please be thorough in your answer regarding your experience, noting specific examples. This assignment has to be at least 400 words, doesn\’t need to be 550 words.
Discussion Question Week 5
Name
Institution
Course
Instructor
Date
Discussion Question Week 5
While doing the search, I preferred google scholar most because is easy to navigate and a bit more accurate to the search words.
Google Scholar
Google scholar mostly gives journal articles without necessarily requiring me to specify other types of publications like books. It also allows one to specify the years of publications I want the articles to come from. For instance, I chose articles published within the last five years. All the articles (10 articles) displayed on the search page contained the key search words (obesity and adults) bolded in the title. Google Scholar also offers more convenience by making it easy to generate an already designed citation of the articles. The property of generating citations in various writing formats like APA, MLA, Chicago, and so on was unique to Google Scholar.
ProQuest
ProQuest is a bit more complex to use by new users. It offers many options to focus the search on the specific type of articles one wants. For instance, one can specify the publication date as they want. Whether they want journals or books and how to sort them (whether in terms of most recent first, relevance, oldest first). The results are specified in terms of whether the journal is given in full or just a preview. The total number of papers found was 123,439 for the paper published within the last five years. I was not able to get the best journals for the study until I chose applicable filters like scholarly journals, last five years, and sorted by relevance, which is a bit complex.
ERIC
ERIC was very precise while focusing the search results. There are so many filters to specify before getting the right journal to use, making it more cumbersome to use compared to Google Scholar. ERIC would be good for a more thorough and specific search than either ProQuest or Google Scholar. It provides specifying filters like publication dates, descriptors that are topics and terminologies related to the search words, source of the articles, authors, publication types such as journal articles, reports, dissertations, information analyses, and so on, education level, audience, location, laws, policies, and programs, assessments and surveys, and what works clearinghouse rating. ERIC gives the number of journals that satisfy these search criteria. For instance, in my search, articles that were published within the last five years were 56, touching on obesity 41, and touching on adult 25. It also allows one to specify whether they want peer-reviewed only or full-text articles. Apparently, ERIC gives the most details.