Text mining as a search engine for the UK Educational Evidence Portal

Research summary

The Education Evidence Portal (http://www.eep.ac.uk) aims to help professional and lay people interested in education and children's services find educational evidence from a range of reputable UK sources in a single place. A new search engine is being developed based on 'text mining' technology by the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM).

Text mining technologies, that can interrogate, sort and classify thousands of electronic documents, have the potential to revolutionise the identification of research and collective expertise for policy-making and practice.  This project is developing and testing text mining to support efficient access to educational evidence through a web portal. It builds on the 'ASSERT toolkit': a set of tools that make text mining technologies available for systematic reviewers.

Methods

In early 2007 we carried out a needs assessment to help us understand how people search for information online. This has informed our discussions with the National Centre for Text Mining regarding the way the search engine will operate. We have contributed to the development of a new education taxonomy that will be used to 'browse' records in the eep portal. We expect to receive the new portal from NaCTeM in July 2009 and we will then carry out a User Oriented Evaluation. This evaluation will consider the following aspects of the portal: functionality, reliability, usability, efficiency, maintainability, portability and will result in a final project report to JISC and the eep development group.

Conference presentations

Morris A, Thomas J (2009) Evidence for policy and practice: the UK Educational Evidence Portal. 9th Annual Campbell Colloquium, Oslo, 18-20 May.

Thomas J (2008) Technological supports for searching the literature. ESRC Research Methods Festival. Oxford 30 June – 3 July.

Thomas J, Stewart R, Oliver S (2008) UK Educational Evidence Portal: Requirements for a new search engine using text mining. 4th International Conference on e-Social Science. Manchester.