You read a book differently than a website, and you read a newspaper article differently than both of those. The same is true for a scholarly article. Here's our method for reading a scholarly article:
Scholarly articles are written by academics for other academics. They are written for people who already have advanced knowledge of the topic being discussed. Reading through each section multiple times, then reading through the whole paper once or twice afterward will help you get a better sense of what this article is saying and what it means.
Check out these tips for making sure you understand the article you are reading!
It might also be helpful to do a search of articles published in The Chronicle of Higher Education - this isn't a peer-reviewed journal, but it will provide a good idea of what conversations have been had around your topic by educators.
Databases and catalogs don't think like Google does. You'll have to translate how you think about your topic into "Database-ese" to get the most out of your search.
"Databases use something called boolean, which means that they really like keywords and the word AND"
"Databases AND boolean AND keywords AND "and"
If I want to find examples of gamification of information literacy in english classes, all I need to do is find my keywords and connect them:
"Information Literacy" AND Gam* and English
The quotes around "Information Literacy" means that it will be searched as a phrase and not as individual words.
The astirix after gam is a wildcard- that means I'll get results that use the word "game", "gamify", "gamification". I'll also get gamy and gambler, but that's unlikely.
NOT is another great joiner, if you want to exclude certain results. If I was only interested in looking at Information literacy in curriculums that were not history I would search
"Information Literacy" AND curriculum NOT history
But I might miss some important stuff that includes the word history, so it's usually better to be specific (AND Chemistry, AND sociology, etc).
