Student Research Center

Student Research Center

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Database.

Reading/Interest Level: Ages 13+

Curriculum ties: Art, English/language arts, business, careers, current issues, health, history, math, science, social studies, sports, technology

Booktalk Ideas: Homework assistance: Demonstrate the difference between searching through large stacks of paper and searching for resources in this database. Especially highlight the convenient way it groups search results.

Challenge Issues: N/A

Challenge Response: First Defense File

Reader’s Annotation:

Research for students made easy! For students exploring a variety of school subjects, this database includes a variety of clearly defined primary, secondary, and tertiary sources that make fulfilling research assignments easy.

About the Database:

The Student Research Center provides a variety of resources for students on nearly any topic they might be researching in school. The databases provides an easy interface to search for reference material, browse topics, access to the Columbia Encyclopedia, and a dictionary. The database also highlights some of the top searches to help students know what’s popular, and spotlights various topics that students may find interesting.

When searches are performed, all types of resources can be pooled together, or filtered by results from magazines, newspapers, books and encyclopedias, biographies, radio and TV news transcripts, primary source documents, and photos. Results can be narrowed by various publications, and can also be sorted by date (oldest or newest first) or relevance.

For students performing multiple searches and needing to collect a variety of resources, they can also save articles to a folder for later review. These folders can also be viewed as a pool of all collected resources, or divided into articles, images, videos, companies, persistent links to searches, and web pages.

Critical Evaluation:

Upon first glance the database doesn’t look very exciting. The text is plain, and to a degree boring. That being said, the interface does benefits from the simplicity because it’s so simple to use. As a student I always had problems deciding on research topics, but “Search by Topic” left hand navigation bar is helpful because users can easily choose a general interest, then find further subcategories to help narrow down their topic. I always worry that when I hit search on an empty search box I will get an error message, but for this database even if no keyword is used and just topics are selected, results will be collected for the user to sort though. True, this isn’t the best technique to narrow a topic down because results can be tens of thousands, but can be easily narrowed by using the various filters to reach a manageable size.

About the Author:

N/A

Justification of Selection:

This research database is designed for student use and is easy to use. Students often have certain requirements to meet when finding sources for research projects, and this database clearly groups sources together so, for example, if students need to find 1 or more primary sources they can do a search and limit by primary sources.