The Citation Pearl Search Strategy in WorldCat

I performed a citation pearl search in WorldCat. This strategy can be used when you already have a citation for your search question. In this strategy, you start with the citation you already have and retrieve it in the database in which you are working in. A search statement can then be formed to find similar records using the indexing terms that appear in the record retrieved.

The topic of interest and naive question are the same as before.

Topic of Interest: Nonuser studies

Naïve Question: What are some of the characteristics of nonuser groups identified by public libraries?

I started with the following citation that I obtained from WorldCat from doing a previous search on the above naïve question.

Citation: Galloway, S. B. B. (1978). The relationship between awareness of the Davis County libraries and their use and nonuse. ERIC reports, ED 179 221. Washington D.C.: Educational Resources Information Center.

The following subject terms were found in the citation record.

Public libraries – Utah – Davis County

Public libraries – Utah – Davis County – Use studies

Library use studies – Utah – Davis County

These terms were used to develop the following search statement.

ss1 subject search: public libraries AND library use studies

The result is 697 records ranked by relevance.

This gives plenty of good sources on user studies in public libraries. However, there are mostly records about users, and it would be nice to view the records that specifically concentrate on non-users. I pulled up a few records that had non-user information in them, but they all had the same subject terms used in ss1. This made me assume that there were no specific subject terms for nonuser. I was able to confirm this by trying to look it up as a thesaurus term and found none other than use studies. Therefore, I added a keyword search to my query for the term “nonuse?”

ss2: public libraries [in subject] AND library use studies [in subject] AND (nonuse? OR non-use?) [in keyword]

The result is 37 records that look promising. The following is a citation that I found.

Citation: Morrill, J. H. (2003). The Wisconsin library user (and non-user): Outcomes of a statewide survey. Madison, WI: Morrill Solutions. http://www.winnefox.org/wplc/current/survey2003/report.pdf.

I would use this method before any of the others mentioned in previous postings if I already had a citation to start off with. It’s quick and much easier than using a search strategy where you have to look into the thesaurus and gather subject terms.