Saturday, November 9, 2013

PsychInfo Searchng





















PsychInfo Search for "Melungeon" and "Melungeons" -  4 results (same four for both searches)


Refined searches:  I then limited searches to "text" and later to "title" and got the same four results.

Best hit: "Seeking roots in shifting ground: Ethnic identity development and Melungeons of southern Appalachia" - Laura Dawn Tugman-Gabriel



Content-based thing I learned from an article in this database: In the article by Paul Brodwin titled "Bioethics in Action and Human Population Genetics Research," the author raised an issue I hadn't really previously thought much about.  He states that critics feel that "treating human communities as gene pools appropriate for scientific comparison fundamentally undercuts their political sovereignty, and hence, it stands as an ethical indictment of the entire project."  I have been very interested in the concept of tri-racial isolate groups since I first heard of Melungeons in the mid-1990's but had never really stopped to think about how it may be damaging to members of the group as a whole to be treated as research subjects.

Searching item/tip learned from this type of database: This database provides a fine example of a instance where "subject" searches are not the most effective ones.  I thought Melungeon (or one of the other tri-racial isolate groups) might possibly be found under a subject search but got zero results for all of them.  Only when I searched for "text" and "title" was I able to find the very limited results I found.

The searching process:  The process was very limited in this database with my chosen topic.  There simply was not much to be found here.  The search process itself was fairly basic and easy to conduct but my subject matter just wasn't easily discovered on this one.

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