ScienceDirect search

The database I chose to search this week is ScienceDirect, distributed by Elsevier. Following Dr. McElrath's suggestions for searching this database, I started with a browse search by choosing from the list of subjects, which looks like this:

 The most promising category for web design is "psychology" (I checked "decision sciences" as well because I was not familiar with the term, but that category did not turn out to be relevant).

Within Psychology, I used the Advanced Search screen to limit my search to items published in the last ten years (as older studies on web design are not likely to be useful since the look of the web has changed so rapidly). I used the basic keyword "web" and then took a look at what field options ScienceDirect offers. I was happy to discover that one of the field options is abstract OR title OR keywords, all in a single search. I have never seen this option before but it seems like a great idea--it covers cases where you want your search term to be featured more prominently than just anywhere in the text, but don't want to be overly restrictive.


This abbreviated screenshot shows the results, which have two problems: Too many results are returned, and the search allowed for the term "web-based," which seems to be introducing a lot of irrelevant results:


The search will be continued in a follow-up post, as Blogger can typically only handle a few large images per post.