Competency 6- Citation Pearl Strategy

For my third database search competency, I chose to use the citation pearl strategy in the Academic Search Complete database. My topic is the same as before: "What are the skills and educational requirements for law librarians?" I looked through some of the articles that I had retrieved in my two previous database search competencies. I decided to use the author's name "Barbara Bintliff" to begin my citation pearl search. I entered this name as Bintliff, Barbara in the Find box and chose "Author's name" in the Field box. (This can also be entered as "Bintliff and Barbara" but the comma after the last name adds the Boolean operator "and.")

I retrieved 3 results:


I clicked on the third hit because an additional author was listed. This article gave me several additional search terms also, such as "law school administration" that might prove helpful in future searches. Clicking on the name of the additional author, Richard A. Danner, gave me 2 results, (or one additional hit to the one I had been viewing). This new article by Danner had several new Subject Terms, but most were quite broad. I tried the "Find Similar Results" feature with this article, but retrieved an untenable and staggering 6,025,228 hits!!

I returned to my first article by my original known author, and clicked on the Subject Term listed there of "Law Libraries-Reference Services." This gave me 10 hits. I chose one of these, "War Stories: Tales from the Law Library Trenches," by the author Mike Chiorazzi, to look for additional Subject Terms. One of the new Subject Terms given in this article was "Law Librarians" as you can see below:


Clicking on the Subject Term "Law librarians" gave me 68 hits, many of which were very relevant and new results that I had not found in my previous database searches on my topic. This would be a very manageable number of hits to search for appropriate articles for my topic.


Out of this set of 68 hits, I was able to glean even more new Subject Terms, such as "Vocational Guidance," that could prove useful in future searching. Also, I noticed that many results give "Author supplied keywords" in addition to the Subject Terms. I decided to see if entering one of these terms in the Find box and choosing the Field "KW - Author Supplied Keywords" would produce any unique results from what I had already found. I retrieved 8 hits, several of which were new and pertinent to my research topic. The article I have chosen to display here, "Wisdom from Mount Nebo (Hiei): Advice to a Young Person Aspiring to Become a Foreign and International Law Librarian," by the author Dan Wade, is quite useful as it discusses the skills and education required to work in this area of law librarianship. It is from my last set of 8 retrieved results, using the "Author Supplied Keywords" field.


This search strategy proved to be quite useful. It was an easy method and worked well with this database. The database provides "Cited References," "Find Similar Results," and links from author names, Subject Terms, etc. that make this approach quite easy to use. I came away from this search with new, useful articles and new Subject Terms to try in future searching. Overall, I was impressed with both the citation pearl search strategy and the Academic Search Complete database.