Research Process
This guide will help orient you to using library resources for course-related or personal research. This guide assumes your are a student at UW-Eau Claire who is doing research for a course-related assignment, but the principles can also be applied to your personal research. To get the best and most appropriate materials for your research, it is necessary to analyze your assignment, organize your search, determine the main concepts which describe your topic, and develop a search statement. Once you have gathered your materials you will need to evaluate them using standard criteria or special criteria set by your professor.
Analyzing your assignment
Before you begin, carefully read the assignment and note any limitations that are provided. Faculty-set limitations will help you to plan your search. Based on this information you can determine such things as which finding aids (online catalog, indexes or abstracts, bibliographies, datafiles, etc.) will be most useful, whether you can get materials through interlibrary loan or if you are limited to items available in the library or in fulltext through one of the library's Internet databases. Here are some common limitations:
- What is the due date for the speech, report, or paper.
- Are there suggested topics or are you to select a topic of interest?
- What is the minimum/maximum time,words, or pages, for the speech, report, or paper.
- What type of materials (and number of each if specified) are to be used: Books, Popular magazines, Scholarly journals, Newspaper articles, Primary sources, Experiments.
Organizing your search
There are four basic steps in the research process:
- Pick a topic which is interesting to you.
- Get background information.
- Get in-depth information.
- Get current information.
At each step you should be actively involved in decision-making. When selecting a topic, look for those you have found interesting in class discussion or, if appropriate, those which you might wish to use in later life (e.g., relating to your future career).
During the background information phase, use specialized encyclopedias and dictionaries (a reference librarian can lead you to those in unfamiliar subject areas) to gather key concepts and noted authors. Other sources in the Reference Collection or Government Publications might also prove useful. Ask any librarian for advice on the best areas for your topic. This phase is where you get an overview of the general topic, begin to formulate researchable questions, and limit or broaden your topic to fit the type and length of final report you are to produce.
In-depth information can be either books, reports of experiments, or primary sources. You will most probably use the online catalog during this phase. Use the concepts you found in the background phase to construct a search statement. The best search in the current online catalog is a keyword search which allows you to group synonyms and combine them with other groupings of concepts. One-term searches are not usually effective--they produce too many results which have little to do with your intended topic.
Current information can be found in journal articles, newspaper articles, government reports, and Internet web pages. Use the same groupings and combinations of terms you used to find materials in the online catalog. You will need to adjust the format you use to enter the terms to suit the database you are searching.
Determining main concepts
Begin by writing a sentence describing your topic, e.g., "I am researching the effect of divorce on children". This is still too broad to get a good set of results since there are often academic effects, economic effects, social effects because of changed home and companions, emotional effects, psychological effects, and possibly others. Select the particular effect you would like to track based on your course or future career interests. A nursing student might target stress or an education major might select academic effects.
Now, list the concepts into groups of ideas with synonyms for each idea. Use terms you notice in encyclopedic background readings or in class discussions. This example provides the following groups of ideas:
- Divorce (synonym-- separation)
- Children (synonyms -- infants, young children, adolescents, young adults, or pre-school age children, kindegarten students, grade school students, middle school students, high school students)
- Effects (synonyms -- economic, poverty)
Look at your terms and try to determine what general discipline would use those terms: Education, Psychology, Social Work, Medicine, Law, etc. If you have difficulty, talk with a reference librarian who can also lead you directly to the area where you will find background materials and help you select the most appropriate subject headings for books or indexes for journal articles.
Developing a search statement
A search statement is a logical combination of your main concepts. Once you have a basic search statement worked out, you can adapt it to particular database protocols. Link all the synonyms for an idea with the word "OR". Then link each set of synonyms with "AND". In databases where you enter the entire search ataement in one line, use "( )" to block the synonyms together. For example, the terms from the previous example would be combined like this:
(divorce or separation) and (infants or young children) and (psychological or emotional)
Notice the word "effects" is no longer part of the statement. This is because it may be replaced by some other term, such as "development", which may not be anticipated.
An easy way to adapt the statement to a particular database would be to compare your terms with those found in the database thesaurus of subject headings. Check the database help documentation, our user guides, or ask a librarian for assistance doing this.
Evaluating your sources
You need to be sure the resources you use meet basic criteria for the level of work expected in your class. Some non-Education majors use IMC children's materials to create speeches for introductory public speaking. Those materials would definitely not be acceptable in upper division classes in any major other than Education. Similarly, popular magazines, found by using the Readers Guide, would not be suitable for scholarly papers. Check your syllabus for class-specific criteria. If none are given, assume that standard discipline-specific criteria for college level research apply. If in doubt, an electronic format aid, the Ten C's for Evaluating Internet Sources can also be applied to traditional sources.
