I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it in these terms, before, but this morning just before a lightning-speed class I suddenly realized that if you have a good article in hand, you can look in four “directions” for more articles like it. (I use “article” because that’s what I was working with this morning, but it works for anything with citations, I guess.)
You can move backward by mining it’s bibliography. You can move forward by using Web of Knowledge to do a cited reference search. And you can move side to side (sort of) by reading it with an eye both for content and for vocabulary that you can use when constructing future searches.
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Brilliant, Iris! This is one of those things that I think scholars know how to do, but which we have no idea whatsoever how to articulate. Oh, also, I’m signing with my new blog, which I’ve had no time to update recently. C’est la vie and all that.
And into my aggregator goes your blog… swoosh. :-)
Yes, it was kind of weird to finally come up with names for things I’d been doing every day of my life for years. I’m not sure it’s the perfect way to explain things, but it sure beats not explaining it at all and just expecting students to remember several unrelated strategies. I worry that they’ll think we just try all those strategies as a kind of shot in the dark. There is method to the madness!
Great term! It’s memorable and explains the concepts. I’m using it with my students.
I was just using the “forwards-backwards” terminology with a class of students this morning, and they seemed to grasp on pretty well to it. I hadn’t thought of the “sideways” approach though! (Oh and by the way, I used a version of your “subversive handout” with a class a few days ago. They liked that I could help them with “Advanced Google-fu” as I put it… )
Oooh! I like “Advanced Google-fu.” I’ll be stealing that one… :)