Research Databases in the Walden Library. Some

¶ … research databases in the Walden Library. Some may be more useful than others for finding articles related to your dissertation topic. Before you begin to search for articles, it is important to identify the databases that will be most useful. It also is important to use the best searching strategies. If you search using keywords that are too broad, you may be inundated with useless information. If you search using keywords that are too specific, you may miss articles that are pertinent to your dissertation topic.

As you prepare for this assignment, be sure to visit the Walden Library web article "Searching Strategies" listed under the resources for this week. Then provide a list of the research databases and/or scholarly resources you plan to search for your literature review. Finally, describe two techniques and/or strategies you think will be useful when searching for and identifying articles for your literature review. Be specific. My Response: Literature Search Strategies My dissertation topic will examine the issue of child development within inner city neighborhoods.

I will attempt to determine whether crime, lack of strong public schools, or the prevalence of single-mother households have a negative impact on child development in this setting. This paper will look at the obstacles many of these children face and assess which variable contributes the most harm. The databases most relevant to this topic are CINAHL Plus, Cochrane Databases of Systematic Reviews, ERIC -- Educational Resource Information Center, and several within ProQuest, especially PsycINFO (Walden University, 2014a).

PubMed and Web of Science are two others that will probably be important databases to search. Once the topic has been defined the next step would be to identify key search terms related to this topic, such as inner city neighborhoods, minority children, disadvantaged children, socioeconomic status, single parent households, crime, criminal justice, schools, teachers, and child development (Walden University, 2014b).

The number of combined citations that would be retrieved using any of these keywords in isolation would be in the tens of thousands, so the strategy would need to be refined by prioritizing the keywords. For example, child development would be an essential key term to be included in any search of the databases; therefore, the term 'child development' would be search together with other search terms, such as 'criminal justice' using the Boolean operator AND.

The specificity of the search string 'child development AND criminal justice' would likely be too general and would need to be combined with another search terms to narrow the results. Since the topic of interest is child development in inner city neighborhoods the parent search terms should be 'child development' in combination with either 'inner city,' 'minority,' 'socioeconomic,' or disadvantaged. This should capture a core collection of articles related to the topic of interest. The parent search terms would be constrained further by adding additional search terms.