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Research - How to

What is Academic Research?

When it comes to academic research, the goal is not to make you into a librarian. The goal is to help you develop the skills needed to complete your assignments. Specifically, the ability to search effectively, evaluate information critically, and use scholarly resources to support your work in an ethical manner. 

Develop Your Topic

To develop a research topic or question, you'll need to do some background reading first.

These are good places to find topic ideas and gather some general information on them:

  • Your textbook or class readings
  • Class discussions
  • Topics in the news
  • Encyclopedias and reference books - use Gale Virtual Reference Library
  • Scan nprED for ideas
  • Do some exploratory searching in Google Scholar to learn more about a broad topic. 
 explore

Once you have an idea you'd like to pursue, you are ready to develop a research question.

Search icons created by Freepik - Flaticon

Adapted from: https://libguides.kennesaw.edu/education

Now that you've done some background research, it's time to narrow your topic. 

Here are some suggestions for narrowing and defining your topic:

  • Is there a specific subset of the topic you can focus on?
  • Is there a cause-and-effect relationship you can explore?
  • Is there an unanswered question on the subject (look for gaps in the research)?
  • Can you focus on a specific time period, condition, context, or group of people?
 refine

Use this framework to help you describe and develop your topic in some detail:

Topic stems

(p.49) Booth, W. C., Booth, W. C., Colomb, G. G., Williams, J. M., & FitzGerald, W. T. (2016). The craft of research (Fourth edition.). University of Chicago Press.

Search icons created by Freepik - Flaticon

Adapted from: https://libguides.kennesaw.edu/education

Click on the image below to access the worksheet. Use the examples to help you refine your topic.

Save a copy once you're ready.

Identify Keywords and Search Terms

Identify the most important ideas or aspects of your research question. You will use those as your keywords to start searching for information about your topic. 

What other words might be used to describe those main ideas or concepts?

Use this worksheet to build your search statement.

My example:

 

Find Articles

Find Journal Articles - Also called "Academic Articles," "Scholarly Articles," or "Peer-Reviewed Articles".

Why You Should Use Them

  • Current Information - Journal articles are typically published monthly and therefore contain current research on a subject.
  • Written by Scholars - Journal articles are written and reviewed by subject area scholars and provide new research, analysis, or information about a specific topic.
  • Peer-Reviewed - This means the article is approved by other subject area experts before it is published.
  • Focused - Academic articles tend to focus in-depth on a narrow subject or research question.

Adapted from: https://libguides.kennesaw.edu/education

Find Databases - Find credible, peer-reviewed articles to support your answer to your research question. 

Why You Should Use Them

  • Credibility - Learn from experts in any field of study. 

  • "Free" - your tuition dollars pay for you to have access to a wealth of research publications. 

Adapted from: https://libguides.kennesaw.edu/education

 

Where to Look -

Click on the information icon  to see what kind of articles are included in each database.

 

BrowZine is a service that allows you to browse, read, and follow scholarly journals with a beautiful visual display.

 

With BrowZine you can:

• Browse and read journals: Browse thousands of top journals by subject, easily review tables of contents, and download full articles.

• Stay Current with My Bookshelf: Create a personal bookshelf of titles to follow and receive new article notifications.

• Access on any device: Easily access BrowZine from your iOS and Android device and on the web to stay up to date wherever you are.

• Save and export articles: Use the BrowZine app to save articles for off-line reading or export to services such as DropBox, Mendeley, RefWorks, EndNote, Zotero, Papers and more.

 Browzine covers

To access, visit https://browzine.com/libraries/487/subjects or download the mobile app from the Apple App Store, Google Play Store or Amazon App Store.

Find Books, Find Statistics

Find Books - At the college level, use books written for an academic audience instead of those written for popular reading.

 

 

Why You Should Use Them

  • Depth - books provide in-depth analysis of a topic.
  • Broad Coverage - books generally provide broad coverage of one or more topics.
  • Extended Research - books can be an invaluable source for extended research.

Adapted from: https://libguides.kennesaw.edu/education

Find Data and Statistics - Providing facts and figures from scholarly research lends support to your argument or position.

Why You Should Use Them

  • Credibility - Data provide meaningful and replicable information about a topic, condition, or population. 

  • Visual - Sometimes a picture or a chart or a graph really is worth a thousand words. 

Adapted from: https://libguides.kennesaw.edu/education

 

Where to Look

Education Books by Topic

Research Refresher

The Research Process

img src: https://ulm.libguides.com/GradResearchGuide