Library Introduction: Research Tips

Before you can begin, you need to know what’s expected of you – are there specific requirements you need to follow?

Common requirements to look out for:

• Number of resources
• Type of resources
• Resource publication date (ex: articles published within the last 5 years)

Try it Out:

When you receive a research assignment, try printing out a copy to read through and highlight important information!

You can also write down any questions you have, then reach out to your professor for clarification!

Once you understand the requirements of your assignment, it’s time to get some ideas flowing!

We can use brainstorming techniques to come up with research topic.

There are many ways to brainstorm, including:

• Freewriting- write down whatever comes to mind and don’t worry about quality! It’s all about getting ideas on paper.
• Making a list- write down some of the ideas you have discussed in class. List as many topics as you can think of.
• Mind mapping- Draw a map of circles connected with lines or arrows. Write down connected ideas in the circles. You can branch out to explore specific ideas.
• Generative AI- Using responsible prompting, generative AI can be a useful tool to help you come up with ideas and narrow your topic.

When researching, your topic needs to be specific enough to explore in depth. As you begin your research, you may be steered in a certain direction based on the information you find. But we can also look at some other methods for narrowing your topic.

Think of the 5 W’s and H:

Who: important people or a specific population related to your topic

What: examples of your topic

When: a specific time frame or even age range related to your topic

Where: a location that is tied to your topic

Why: reasons your topic is important

How: how your topic has influenced things or people

A research question is pretty much exactly what it sounds like – it’s the question you are trying to answer with your research. So, what can we do to help convert our topic into a question?

• Reflect- are there questions that came up as you identified your topic?
• Refine- dive deeper into the how and why of your topic.
• “So what?”- why should people care about your topic?

Once you've come up with a question, evaluate it based on the following criteria:

• Clear- is your research question easy to understand? Is there more than one possible answer to your question?
• Focused- Would you be able to effectively find sources to answer your research question? Is it too vague, or too specific?
• Complex- is your research question too simple? Is the answer obvious? Is it too complicated to answer within the confines of your assignment?

Keywords, or search terms, are the words you use in database search boxes. These words are the main ideas of your research topic. Developing keywords involves multiple steps, including:

• Identifying the main ideas of your research topic
• Brainstorming synonyms and related words for those ideas
• Continuously reevaluating the effectiveness of your keywords

To identify the main ideas of our topic, we can break down our research question. Let’s take a look at an example:

Research Question:

How does social media use cause anxiety in teens?

Once we've determined what our main ideas are, we can come up with synonyms and related terms.

Why do we do this? Because sometimes when you are searching for information on a topic, the authors of sources may use different terminology to talk about the same thing. If you only search with the terms you initially used for your research question, you could miss out on a lot of results!

Example:

The first thing you’ll need to know about searching a database is how to combine all of the keywords you came up with.

You can do this using what we call Boolean operators. These are terms that connect keywords to create phrases that the database can understand. Let’s tak a closer look at the Boolean operators: AND, OR, and NOT.

In general, you will use OR between synonyms/related words.

And you will use AND between these groups of related words.

The great news is that databases usually handle the AND for you.

Here’s an example of what a search might look like in Academic Search Complete, using our example keywords:

Wildcards are another great tool you can use while searching. These are special characters that can be used to stand for any letter in the alphabet. The exact symbol used varies depending on the database, but some common symbols are ?, *, #, and $.

Example:

Searching: wom?n

Finds results with: woman, women, womyn

A truncation symbol is a type of wildcard symbol that is used to represent any number of letters at the end of a word. The most common truncation symbol is an asterisk, but you may want to check your database to make sure.

Example:

Searching: teen*

Finds results with: teen, teens, teenager, teenagers

By enclosing two or more words in quotation marks, you can perform a phrase search, which tells the database to return results containing exact phrases only.

For example, searching “social media” will search for results containing that exact phrase. Without quotation marks, the search might return results containing the words social and media, but not in that exact order.

Now let’s take a look at what our search might look like using a combination of all the techniques we learned:

That continuous reevaluation of your search strategy is part of refining your search. This can involve a number of things depending on whether your search yields too many or too few results, including:

• Checking for misspellings
• Increasing or decreasing the number of concepts searched
• Trying broader or narrower terms
• Removing or replacing terms
• Increasing or decreasing the number of synonyms for a term

Another thing you can do to help refine your search is to apply filters. Filters limit your search by setting restrictions on results. These may include format, publishing year, language, and more.

Schedule and appointment with one of our librarians for assistance with any part of your research process.