subject specific database

I chose to google as my specific database. My search string was “homeless AND poverty AND Minnesota”.  Most databases brought up relevant websites and information for my paper. Although, google brought up thousands of results it still did give me a few good results. Other databases such as the academic search premire website gave me quite a few results, but not as much. They seemed to be something that I would trust a little bit more than something off of google, maybe that’s because I’ve always been told not to use google for a scholarly database.

Getting to narrow down results was very easy for ASP, I just simply added some more describing words in my sentence. Google, on the other hand was harder to try and narrow down. Although, I did narrow it down a little bit by adding some more specific words, I still ended up with thousands of results to dig through.

ASP had about 5 or 6 relevant results for me, that I most likely will use in writing my paper. Google did have a few that were informational and relevant, but there were simply too many to sift through to find all that I wanted.  ASP had only one full text available for me and google obviously had all that I wanted to go through, ready for me to read in full text.

My research questions definitely have changed. Being able to narrow down questions and twirk them in ways to get better answers and results was a learning experience.

My biggest challenge in composing questions for my search string would be narrowing things down. It took me a few tries to get a good search string on my topic with good results. I think this is just going to take practice in figuring out better words and connecting words to use.