Helping Students Develop Alternative Searching Strategies Using Google and Wikipedia at NJIT

Last night I taught information seeking skills to students of ENE 360 (Fundamentals of Water and Wastewater Treatment).  Since these students had seen me lecture in a previous course, I decided to spend more time with helping them to develop search strategies.  I wanted to show how searching Google and the Wikipedia could help them develop search strategies.  Students are tempted to use the literal terminology of the topic of their paper.  Let me give two examples.

1.Find papers discussing water sustainability focusing on emerging contaminants (those not regulated)

The obvious search strategy is water sustainability AND emerging contaminants.

A search is Scopus yielded several good articles on this topic.  When I searched for the phrase “emerging contaminants” in Google I found this very useful web site:

http://www.creec.net/whatareec.htm  - Site of the Consortium for Research and Education of Emerging Contaminants.  It gave detergents, fragrances, prescription and nonprescription drugs, disinfectants, and pesticides as examples of emerging contaminants.  Thus an alternative search strategy would be:

Water sustainability AND pesticides

2. Find papers discussing water sustainability focusing on Advanced Oxidation.

Again the obvious search strategy is Water sustainability AND Advanced Oxidation, but what is meant by advanced oxidation.  I found this entry in the Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_oxidation_process

This article stated:

Advanced Oxidation Process refers to a set of chemical treatment procedures designed to remove organic (and sometimes inorganic) materials in water and waste water by oxidation through reactions with hydroxyl radicals (·OH). In real-world applications of wastewater treatment, however, this term usually refers more specifically to a subset of such chemical processes that employ ozone (O₃), hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) and/or UV light. One such type of process is called in situ chemical oxidation

.

Thus an alternative search strategy would be:

Water sustainabilty AND oxidation AND peroxide

.

Hopefully, the students learned from this as my lecture was likely their third exposure to information literacy as students at NJIT.