Search Strategy: Citation Pearl Growing
To begin this search, I used an article that I had found in a
previous search of Academic Search Complete. The article was:
Johnson,Walter H., Joseph Sottile, and Charlotte R. Witting.
"What One Activity Would You Recommend to Teachers Who
Are Nervous about Teaching Poetry?." English Journal 96, no. 1
(2006): 23-24. (Accession Number: 22428852)
The subject terms for that article were:
*ACTIVITY programs in education
*POETRY -- Study & teaching
*SONNETS
*TEACHING methods
*EDUCATION -- Experimental methods
*MUSIC & literature
I chose to search BIP using the Advanced Search
option. I used the term “Poetry – Study & teaching” from my
original article and found 471 hits.
One of the hits was for this book:
Steinman,Lisa M. Invitation to Poetry: The Pleasures of
Studying Poetry and Poetics. Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007.
These subjects are listed for this book:
POETICS
The subject headings are hyperlinked so that clicking on them
takes the user to other books on the same subject. Since I had
already used Poetry – Study & teaching, I clicked on “Poetics”
and found 1,282 results.
Language Arts & Disciplines/Study & Teaching produced
15,412 hits, while Literary Criticism/Poetry produced 22,264.
Obviously, those results would have to be refined and limited
in some way to be useful, but it is clear that Citation Pearl
Gathering can broaden a search as much as is necessary to
find the desired results.
Searching Books in Print was different than the other searches
I have done because I was searching for books about poetry
rather than articles. The Citation Pearl Gathering strategy was
still useful because it gave me ideas about other search terms
that I could use. BIP makes that process very easy by using
hyperlinks. I discovered that Academic Search Complete
also has a feature that encourages pearl gathering—a tab that
invites the searcher to “Find More Like This.” I don’t think it
would be possible to ever completely exhaust the possibilities
of a pearl gathering search. There would always be another
search term to try. The searcher just has to decide when he or
she has enough information.
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