1st broad search

After having difficulty determining a specific question for my Lit. Review, or way in which to address that question, I decided to tackle the key words in a modified form of my question. I set-out to search the ERIC ProQuest Databases (32) for combinations of theses key words. I chose to use combination of the words because if I used them individually I knew I was going to get information that might not be of interest for this work. I organized the results into the RefWorks Web Based Bibliographic Management Software and created folders specific for the key-word searches.

8 folders were created with combinations of the key-words (2 and 3): biology, online, concept integration (also used as a synonym for independent searches, intradisciplinary integration), gamification, and community college.

I read through the titles and general descriptors, as the database produced the results and picked the articles that seemed to address the topics of interest within the search. I kept in mind the actual search, not the Lit. Review; I wanted to see these key-words working together, therefore producing a larger result to work with and will be followed by a larger filtering in the next step. After producing all the results, I search for duplications of results and eliminated them.

Interestingly, some of the articles that I eliminated were not just duplications, but triplications. Therefore, they appeared in multiple of the searches of word combinations. This to me is an indication that I am hitting the relevant articles within my searches. Also, based on my professors and peer's feedback, I pulled back on the initial key-words I wanted to use making them more broad - community college vs minorities. As I skimmed through the resulting articles, many of the topics I did not address were part of the results; when searching for community colleges, many of the articles directly addressed the topic of minorities. Also, while I did not search for "web 2.0 tools", when using "online" as part of the query, these tools were a result of the search in a similar way than minorities. Consequently, the only word in my initial interest that did not surface as part of the results was "gamification" and thus, it also became a key-word.

The final tally of articles was 317 articles, organized into the 8 folders. I will now begin 2nd filtering step, skimming searches and eliminating duplications was 1st; reading the abstracts of the articles within the folders and eliminating those that are not relevant. I will use a wide discrimination range in order to keep as many articles as possible. If they are not relevant, they will be eliminated at later stages of the process - I just do not want to be as discriminatory at this stage. Also, I will keep a list of emerging topic and themes - still debating if to do it as part of the abstract reading or doing it after, as a summary step.