Whether or not your professional role calls for you to undertake research as an integral part of your work life, you will likely have any number of opportunities to use research in your work. It may be, for example, that your corporation wants to know something about competing products, the performance of similar products, or the like. It could also be that you want to propose a new product or process and simply want to gather background. At another extreme, you may find yourself in a department for which research is your main purpose. At any rate, you need to understand that research methods can range from the ability to understand existing research, usually found through traditional library (in print or online searches) searches, to developing original research tools. While it is beyond the scope of this course to include all of these abilities, we will learn how to conduct useful research regarding a topic of interest. We will focus on electronic sources, with an emphasis on sources in scholarly databases, using print guides (e.g., indices to research in a field) when they are helpful for directing our online searching. We will learn to critically read or assess what we find.
Searching for information is a like solving a puzzle or a mystery. That's a truism, but it's accurate. You have to be willing to follow a planned research path and you must be curious about potential paths. If you happen to be a fan of detection, you know that most good detectives try to decide what they already know before they attempt to clarify any ambiguities. (In our exercises, we call that intellectual or conceptual preparation for searching.)
What does that mean? First, it means understanding the evidence already in hand. For research into topics with a publication history, you should begin by finding resources that review existing research. (What do we already know, or think, about this topic?) Try to find major bibliographic collections within a fairly narrow time frame (the past three to five years might be a good range for general subjects; shorter for timely subjects). The key to this kind of search in online searching is to construct your search terms so that you are looking for your major term plus the word "bibliography." Thus, if you were searching for "corporate downsizing," the search term would be "corporate downsizing bibliography."
Notice that even with such a well-defined search term, you still have many difficulties, difficulties that underlie all searches. You are guessing, no matter how good you are at researching, that "corporate" will yield more records than "company"; that "downsizing" is a better term than "layoffs" or "reductions in force" or "right sizing." Finding the right term(s) is often fraught with difficulty. (Tip: before searching, check the controlled vocabulary of the search engine you are using to find the vocabulary the engine applies to your chosen interest; databases usually have a link to this vocabulary, although web search engines might not.)
To reduce the frustration with search vocabulary, some fields, notably psychology, have developed thesauri that catalog all major terms along with their synonyms. If your professional field has such tools, you should try to discover them. Ask a major professor or experienced practitioner or professional librarian for help.
Try searching both text (print) and electronic sources for such "finding aids," as librarians call them. An advantage of searching online for electronic "finding aids" is that you might use Boolean operators to refine your search. (Tip: before using Boolean operators, check in 'advanced searching' or 'search help' to see whether the engine you are using supports Boolean operators.) The major disadvantage is that so much electronic information (particularly on the Internet) is unprocessed (unedited, unmanaged) that its quality and usefulness tends to be uncertain. In the example search on "corporate downsizing," above, some search engines might return several thousand records; simply reviewing them would be too time-consuming to be useful. Another disadvantage of doing entirely online searching is that you might exclude important sources that are available only in print. In some fields, much information will never be online (not permitted, too expensive to digitize, etc). Don't ignore print sources entirely.
Once you have collected these major bibliographic sources or "finding aids" on your topic, you should review them for two important clues. First, you should try to identify who the major players (important thinkers, product developers, critics) are, and what the major issues (topics stmulating debate, or simplyon the list of current interest) in regards to your topic. Second, you should identify the major sources (journals, newspapers, websites, etc.) for your topic. The results obtained from searching bibliographies in these ways will be very helpful in directing your focused searches, practically speaking. They also provide the necessary conceptual and informational background you will need to critically assess the results of specialized searches. (To prepare for those specialized searches, see News for project 1, syllabus.)
I understand that this approach gives little notice to traditional (exclusively print-based) searching, and, instead, emphasizes electronic searching (using print sources as aids). I take this approach because my guess is that you have had a fair amount of undergraduate instruction in paper-based searching. However, as the term unfolds, if I see enough of an indication that I need to re-visit that topic, I will do so. Do NOT be reluctant to ask for assistance! Everyone brings a different level of experience as a researcher to 7730. Use what you know, and get help when you need it.
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