Library Research for Academic Writing
Overview
This resource will provide college students with the skills necessary to find academic articles in support of a research writing assignment.
This resource is written for a college level reader. The exercises are intended to be accomplished by using your college or university library website and the research resources on it. While this resource can be accomplished independently, it has been written to serve as instruction within a research methods course and assumes that students have an actual research project to which they can apply these strategies.
Introduction
Instructor Notes: The reading and exercises in this resource can be adapted to several different disciplines. It has been written in generalized language so that instructors can easily make changes to customize the resource to their course.
Because of the general nature of the exercises, instructors may need to clarify some aspects of the tasks or specify what tools should be used based on the student's home institution.
Welcome to Library Research for Academic Writing. This resource is written for a college level reader and the exercises are intended to be accomplished by using your college or university library website and the research resources on it. While this resource can be accomplished independently, it has been written to serve as instruction within a research methods course and assumes that you have an actual research project to which you can apply these strategies.
Let’s look at a common college writing scenario: you are assigned to write a research paper, an annotated bibliography or a literature review. Maybe your project involves each of these steps. Where do you begin, and how can you find the best and most reliable writing from all the information available to you, whether it is in print or in an online format?
If you understand this reading and perform the practice exercises recommended here, you can develop the skills you need to be a sophisticated online searcher who can independently explore any topic you are assigned in school; any project you are given in your future career; or any interest you have in your personal life. Not only will you be able to find and access the information, but you will also have the knowledge to make decisions about the quality and credibility of any information.
If this sounds like a valuable academic skill, it is! It is also a valuable job skill and a valuable life skill. So read on and join me in becoming a better student and entering the world of scholarly research!
Annotated Bibliography, Literature Review, or Both?*
The annotated bibliography comes in various forms and serves a variety of purposes. Thus, authors might include an annotated bibliography at the end of their text to offer further reading. Advanced students might be required to produce an extended annotated bibliography before they begin their dissertation. Students might create an annotated bibliography at the preliminary stage of their research.
Writing an annotated bibliography helps researchers organize their sources and gain perspective on the larger conversation about their topic. It is a list of sources (or a bibliography) divided into two parts: The first part, the citation, contains basic information about the source, such as the author’s name, the title of the work, and the date of publication. The second part contains individual paragraphs that describe, evaluate, or summarize each source. The annotated bibliography serves as a foundation for a larger project, like a college-level research paper.
An academic literature review serves a similar purpose to an annotated bibliography, summarizing existing research, but it takes a different form and is more evaluative. Literature reviews are an indispensable tool for researchers. Instead of having to read dozens of articles on a topic, a researcher could instead read a literature review that synthesizes what is known and puts each piece of scholarship into conversation with the others. This could be not only quicker, but also more valuable.
The job of a literature review is to examine a collection of research or scholarship on a given topic and show how that scholarship fits together. Literature reviews summarize, describe, evaluate, and synthesize the work of other authors and researchers while looking for common trends/patterns, themes, inconsistencies, and gaps in this previous research. As the author of the literature review, it is your job to join the pieces together, giving your reader a complete picture of what researchers know about your topic.
Literature reviews occur in two general forms—as a background section in a scholarly work or as a stand-alone genre in and of itself. In both situations, the basic purpose and structure of the literature review is similar: it is the length and the scope that varies. In undergraduate study the Traditional or Narrative Review as a background section is most common. Narrative reviews are somewhat exploratory in their content—in a narrative review you are synthesizing the results of specific texts selected for their connection to your topic.
Other types of literature reviews, those which are stand-alone publications include a Systematic Review and a Scoping Review. Narrative Reviews can also serve as stand-alone pieces of writing. Systematic reviews provide comprehensive coverage of the research on a specific line of inquiry. In a systematic review, the methodology section is a primary component so readers can verify that all relevant research has been included. These are frequently used in Medicine and Social Sciences. In a scoping review, the purpose is to identify the types of research on a topic and gaps in current research being performed. The focus is often on new and developing, possibly incomplete, research.
Want to learn more? Visit these resources
Costello, V. (2023). Annotated Bibliography. In Writing for Inquiry and Research. Windsor & Downs Press. https://doi.org/10.21900/wd.19
Williams, C. (2023). Literature Review. In Writing for Inquiry and Research. Windsor & Downs Press. https://doi.org/10.21900/wd.19
*This section reuses and revises text from the OER: Costello, V. (2023). Annotated Bibliography. In Writing for Inquiry and Research. Windsor & Downs Press. https://doi.org/10.21900/wd.19
Exploring Your Field
Instructor Notes: Students may find that there are multiple entries in general encyclopedias relevant to their search. They may also be able to identify entire encyclopedias specific to their area of interest. This exercise is intended to encourage their exploration of encyclpoedia entries (2000-5000 words) rather than book length works. A good response to this exercise will include a thoughtful answer to item four, "Record any salient terms, theories, research or events that will help you in your literature search."
What will you study? If you are reading this you are probably a college student in a class with a research project component. Whether it is a Natural Science, Social Science, Professional Studies, or Arts and Humanities, academic scholarship is categorized into a discipline. What makes scholarship part of a discipline is the subject matter, the approach taken by the author toward that subject matter, and the methods of inquiry and analysis that the author or authors employ. In addition, whatever that discipline might be, it will be divided into several subfields or subdisciplines.
Before we dive into the strategy of online searching, we need to make some decisions about the scope of the topic we are investigating so we can rule out irrelevant information and make informed decisions about where we will look for the academic literature on your topic. Ask yourself these questions:
In what area or subdiscipline do your interests lie?
What are the major questions or ideas in this subdiscipline?
What do you already know about the subject matter?
Depending on your assignment, you may already have the scope of your subject decided for you, which makes the next decision that much easier. However, if you have a lot of latitude for subjects to study, it might be useful to do a few short readings to help you narrow down your choices.
Appropriate, credible, high quality readings on commonly studied ideas, events, or people within a subject area can be found in general encyclopedias, subject encyclopedias, biographical dictionaries, historical dictionaries, handbooks and manuals and research guides. All of these types of reference works, whether print or online (and sometimes both) are available at an academic library. For problem-free and fast access to these tools, ask the librarians at your university or college library for help finding and using these information resources.
Wait a second. You are really busy. You have other classes and a job and maybe you didn’t start on this assignment right away. You might be asking yourself, “why do I have to do this pre-work before I can choose a topic?”
Learning a bit about the topic will help you decide if you are really interested in the subject.
Your interest will help you sustain effort in the project, thereby producing better work. It is a lot easier to research and write about something you are genuinely interested in than something you don’t care about.
It will save you time in the long run
One of the things you are doing by reading short, factual pieces about a topic is that you are learning the subject terminology, names of theories and theoretical concepts, names of important scholars, and research in the topic, and perhaps key people and events. You are learning the language of your discipline. This knowledge will serve you well as you continue researching the literature.
Keep notes and lists on what you read and collect citations and permalinks to materials so you can get back to them easily when you need to.
When you have identified and read a few encyclopedia entries and selected a topic of inquiry, you are ready to start developing a research question.
Exercise I
Perform the following tasks
- Using your library resources or your favorite free search engine, identify two or more encyclopedia entries in a subfield of your discipline*. If you are using a search engine, Wikipedia is acceptable. If you discover there are entire encyclopedias dedicated to your field or subfield, dig a little deeper and identify specific entries in the encyclopedias.
- Read these entries and summarize them in two or three sentences in a document.
- Cite the entries in the style required by your assignment.
- Record any salient terms, theories, research or events that will help you in your literature search.
*Ask the librarians at your school for guidance in finding the encyclopedias either online, or as print or electronic books.
Developing a Good Research Question
Your particular research question and the methods by which you will conduct research, such as data selection, and/or collection, and data analysis, are subject to your assignment and your instructor’s approval. We are interested in knowing how and where to find relevant, credible scholarship on a topic. Qualitative and quantitative research methods are adequately covered in textbooks, and there are many handbooks on research methods in the Social Sciences. However, we can make some general observations about common aspects of good research questions.
Your research project has clear time and resource constraints. Do you have a few weeks for the project or an entire semester? When developing a good research question, you need to know if it can be accomplished in the time allowed and with the resources at your disposal.
Another important consideration is the relevance to the field. How much has already been studied in the area? Will there be a sufficient body of literature interrogating the subject that you will be able to draw upon to help you state your ideas?
Alternatively, is your question a matter of debate? Has the question you wish to ask already been answered to the satisfaction of most scholars in the field?
If the topic is dependent on recent events or phenomena, has it been so little studied that you can’t find adequate research to provide you with a context for your work? Remember that it takes time for scholars to think and write and respond to each other. A useful metaphor for scholarly research findings is the idea of a conversation. As a researcher—even at an undergraduate level—you will be situating your ideas within the context of what other scholars have written about a topic. If the topic is recent, can you draw connections to your question and to research published in the literature?
Want to learn more? Visit these resources
Reisner, A. (2023). Reading Social Science Methods. Windsor & Downs Press. https://doi.org/10.21900/wd.18
Sheppard, V. (2020). Research Methods for the Social Sciences: An Introduction. https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/jibcresearchmethods/
Finding Academic Literature 1: What is it?
Instructor Notes:
1. The intention for exercise two is for students to find journals relevant to their research interest. That means they may find journals outside the context of the course in which they are enrolled.
2. If students use an open web search engine to find journals, they may find titles that are not subscribed to by their home institution. This is acceptable and teaches the student the distinction between subscribed journals to which their access is seamless, and journals behind a "paywall". Librarians at your institution can help draw these distinctions and make clarifications.
Now that you have learned a bit more about your general topic area, for example, to which subdiscipline or subfield it belongs, and you have developed a research question, your next goal is to find academic literature that addresses your topic. If you aren’t very experienced in writing academic research papers you might be wondering a few things. What is academic literature? Where can you find it? What are some effective ways to search for it?
The academic literature, also referred to as scholarly literature, or journal literature is a modality of communication that scholars use to share research with each other. Primarily, this communication takes the form of articles published in periodicals called journals. A journal is a publication that comes out several times a year, often quarterly, but sometimes as many as twelve or more times each year. Each issue includes several articles written by one or more expert researchers, like your professors. Academic journals have a few differences from other periodical publications that make them distinct.
Academic journal articles are written at a very high level of expertise, making them difficult to understand by readers who are not experts themselves. Remember, these are experts communicating with other experts in a specialized subject area. This is good to keep in mind when you begin reading academic research. You may need some extra time reading to fully comprehend the ideas. In contrast, articles published in magazines, newspapers or on websites are usually written in language that can be understood by the average person.
Academic journal articles also tend to be longer than articles for the general readership. Forty to sixty page articles are common. In addition to being lengthy, journal articles follow a formal structure that includes a literature review, a description of the methods used to conduct the research, research findings, and a bibliography or list of works cited. These article sections will be present in some form in most academic articles, in addition to other sections, depending on the discipline. These sections should seem familiar to you, since you are being asked to provide a literature review and/or an annotated bibliography and a list of works cited for your research paper.
Another distinction to be made about academic journal articles is the form of review or editing that article manuscripts must undergo prior to being published. Most journal articles go through a peer-review process of editing, before being approved for publication in a scholarly journal. Peer review means that the author, for example Professor Jones, Ph.D., submits her article to a journal, where it is then sent anonymously to three or more professors in the same field at different institutions. These other Ph.D. s review the article for accuracy and quality, and make a recommendation about whether it should be published or not. It is common for an article to be returned to an author for revision before it is published. Sometimes articles are rejected from a journal. In this way, a journal strives to only publish the most appropriate and best research in that specialized area. Peer review is a form of quality control.
Exercise 2: Journal Examples
Using resources such as the library catalog or research guide at your school, or your favorite search engine, identify five journals* and answer the following questions about each one.
- How long has the journal been publishing (i.e. did it begin in 1940, 1890, or 2010?)
- Who publishes it?
- How much does a subscription cost?
- Does your college or institution subscribe to this journal?
Journals are often published by scholarly associations, and also by university presses. They are also published by for-profit corporate academic publishers. The answers to the questions can usually be found on the journal’s home page. If you are reviewing a print issue, you might find the information in the first few pages of the issue prior to the table of contents.
*Ask the librarians at your school for guidance in identifying journals to explore.
Finding Academic Literature 2: Where can you find it?
Instructor Notes: Each of the exercises assumes the student will be provided with or will create their own documents in which to record their answers and progress. Guided exploration is the overarching aim of the exercises rather than "correct" answers. If a student is far afield from the intention of the exercise, the instructor and or a partner librarian can provide suitable redirection in order to help the student understand the goal.
It should be clear by now that when you hear the terms academic literature, scholarly literature, or peer reviewed articles, that these terms are synonymous with each other. It should also be clear that journals are highly selective and publish highly specific subject areas. A journal in Sociology won’t be publishing any Biology research. But even within Sociology there will be several different journals publishing research within the subdisciplines. Thousands of scholarly journals exist to publish research in many different areas of scholarly inquiry. It can be a little intimidating to think about the number of possible publications where you can find research relevant to your topic. How can you possibly search across all of those journals and also be able to ignore all the extraneous “noise” information you get when searching Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or other search engines?
Lucky for you, librarians have been working on this problem for a long time. You have online tools called article databases available through your institution’s library. These tools allow you to search across thousands of journal publications from many years ago up to the most current issues.
Every journal indexed in a database will have published thousands of articles, and each one of those articles is described in a unique database record. College and university libraries make dozens and sometimes hundreds of article databases available to use. The libraries pay annual access fees so that faculty, staff and students at that institution can search the databases, and access the full articles when available.
Choosing to search these tools for information rather than searching the open Web will save you time and effort. You also sidestep questions of credibility, currency, relevance, accuracy, and purpose by using article databases (search the CRAAP test for more information). Unlike search engines, in which your results are influenced by commercial interests and algorithms that increase confirmation bias, library databases only include information already published and vetted by an editorial process. This does not mean that all the information contained in library databases is objectively true and factual. But knowing that the information you find in a database has already undergone a review process will help you decide whether you want to trust and use the information. You always need to think critically when evaluating information.
Another resource to consider is a subset of Google that is limited to academic research. Google Scholar allows you to find scholarly articles on any scholarly topic. Be aware, unlike your library’s licensed databases, Google Scholar will not provide you with links to the full articles. Google Scholar will provide a link to the journal publisher’s page. The journal publisher will gladly sell you the article, even if your college already pays for it. This is unnecessary. You never have to pay for access to articles, so don’t fall into that trap. Your librarians can help you get the article quickly and free of charge.
Exercise 3: Types of article databases
Using the library website at your institution, explore the variety of databases available to you and answer the following questions.*
- Can you tell how many databases your school licenses for your access? (50? 100? 300? More?)
- You can probably find an alphabetical list of databases on your library website, but they may also be listed by subject. How many databases are focused on your major area of study? (For example, if you are a History Major, are there 25 databases valuable for History research?) If there are no databases specific to your major, How many are available at the next hierarchical grouping of your discipline, i.e. Social Sciences? List three of the article databases recommended for research in your area.
- Do the databases focus on the academic literature? What about other publications that are not academic in nature, like magazines and newspapers? Are there databases that allow you to search for newspaper and magazine articles? List three databases that include publications aimed at general readers.
*Ask the librarians at your school for help navigating the library website.
Finding Academic Literature 3: What are some effective ways to search for scholarly literature?
Instructor Notes: This may be the most challenging exercise in that the potential for disparities in functionality across the library databases can be great. That in itself is a good lesson, but if the student cannot accomplish the exercise exactly, the instructor or partner librarian may be able to point out any parallels between the tools. In some cases, the difference in content or the way the content is organized may be so at odds that the selected databases can't be compared effectively. Some redirection may be necessary to select tools more closely aligned.
The search interfaces for most article databases are sophisticated and powerful, and they can be challenging to understand for the beginning researcher. Luckily, if you understand some basic principles about database record structure and how databases operate, you can usually transfer your search skills and strategy from one interface to another, even when the databases are produced by different companies and differ greatly in the way they look.
When you perform a keyword search in a library catalog, article database or a discovery system, the first page you are presented with is a list of your search results in an abbreviated form. The information presented in the abbreviated (short) record will often be simply the citation, such as the article title, author(s), publication name, and issue information. To help illustrate this difference let’s compare them to search engine results. if you click on a result in a search engine result list, you will be sent to a new web page. However, if you follow the link of a short record from your search results you don’t leave the database. Instead you are taken to the full record, or full bibliographic record of an article. This full record provides you with much more information about that article, and allows you to make a better judgment about whether it will help you in your research.
A full bibliographic record in an article database is a description of a journal article containing several short elements about that article. This information about the article is called metadata. Your search terms (keywords) are matched with these elements, or metadata, and ranked as more or less relevant to your search based on where and how frequently they appear in the record, such as in the title. The article database is not matching your keywords within the full text of the article. Only specialized databases like JSTOR or Google Books will search within the entire text of publications.
Each of these elements of metadata are fields within the database, and all the individual fields of an article together comprise the full record. Having cited articles before, you are already familiar with several metadata fields such as title and author(s), source (or journal title), year, etc. Additional metadata fields which are important to be familiar with are the abstract, ISSN or the International Standard Serial Number, author-supplied keywords, and subject headings.
As a researcher, you can specify where you want your keywords to be matched. An example of this strategy would be requiring your keywords to be identified within the title of articles, thus ensuring that any result would contain your terms in a very prominent position. Other useful fields might be the article abstract (a summary of the article) or subject headings, which are sometimes called descriptors.
The subject headings assigned to an article are a special type of metadata called controlled vocabulary. Think of an assignment when you have been asked to identify keywords for your research topic. You can often think of more than one term to describe each of the important ideas. A subject heading is a term used by catalogers and indexers (librarians who create article records) to serve as the official word or phrase to represent an idea. When you first perform your keyword search, you should notice the subject headings that best represent your research topic. Subject Headings are a very powerful way to identify relevant articles. Like hashtags, which are a social media user’s strategy to link together conceptually similar posts, subject headings link together conceptually similar articles.
A final strategy to consider in searching article databases is to employ limiters or filters to control the scope of your search. Some common filters include limiting to peer reviewed articles, or limiting to full-text articles. You may also limit by the year or a range of years, or by subject area(s). Keep in mind that filters narrow your results which can potentially eliminate relevant results from your search.
Exercise 4: Employing search strategies
Using the databases you listed in exercise three, choose two of them to explore. Complete the following tasks in both databases.*
1. Search the databases with your keywords. Do not place any limitations on the search. Do not focus your terms to any fields. Review the first 20 search results. How many of these would you consider relevant to your topic?
2. Go to the advanced search in the database and repeat your keyword search. This time, select a date range to limit your search. This might be the most recent 10 years, but it might also be a different period of time depending on your topic. For example, are you interested in the research published about your topic from a specific historical period, like 1990-2000? Does this date limiter change the relevance of your search results?
3. Perform the advanced search again, this time selecting “peer reviewed journal articles” as a limiter. The databases you chose may have different terms to express the peer-reviewed limitation. Are your results better or worse?
4. Select two or more articles that you consider relevant to your topic. From the full bibliographic record of these articles, review the subject headings assigned to the articles (they might be labeled descriptors). Select two or more subject headings and explore the articles you retrieve when you search by those subject headings. How much more (or less) relevant are the records returned by the subject heading searches?
*Ask the librarians at your school for help accessing or navigating the databases.
Credibility and Authority: Who are the experts?
Instructor Notes: This section is intended to illustrate the idea that "Authority is Constructed and Contextual," part of the Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).
Up to this point we have been assuming that reliable, credible literature is research published by credentialed professionals in a scholarly discipline. In most cases this is true. You want to get scientific research from people who know how to do science and whose work is reviewed by knowledgeable experts. But it is not only professors, Ph.Ds. and people in positions of power and leadership who can speak authoritatively on a topic. A person’s life experiences provide the knowledge to give credible testimony just as much as any established expert. If you are writing about a significant event or social phenomenon and you wish to provide evidence of the lived experience of it, you would seek out first-person commentary, or you might perform interviews, surveys or focus groups to collect qualitative data. These answers and stories have as much authority, credibility and validity as any social-scientific analysis. Indeed, your own commentary on questions related to aspects of your experience or knowledge deem you the authority for that domain of information.
Do not discount an information source purely on the grounds that it is not authored by someone in a position of power or traditionally recognized authority. Make informed choices about the context of expertise in the area of your research.
Who Gets Access to Research?
Instructor Notes: In this exercise, the student will identify specific Open Access journal titles without regard to discipline. They may also identify resources that list Open Access journals like the DOAJ, or, the Directory of Open Access Journals, or search tools that aggregate Open Access scholarly literature in much the same way library databases aggregate scholarly journal articles. The comparison between results from the major commercial search engines and the privacy conscious search engines is intended to help underscore the nuances of algorithmic bias that affect searches using identical terms.
In exercise item number two, students will ideally identify discipline or subject specific repositories of Open Access scholarly literature, effectively assisting the student in focussing their research scope to journals within a discipline.
At this point in your literature research, you may be a little overwhelmed by the sheer number of articles there are in your discipline. Each one of the article databases you have explored contain articles from thousands of journals published over several decades. Perhaps you feel as if you have only explored a fraction of the research tools at your disposal. If so, you are not alone. Most students feel this way, and even professional researchers, like your professors, find it difficult to keep up with current research and understand how to use the tools to access it.
Academic publishing is a large industry and it has only grown in the past 25 years. Think about how many higher education institutions there are in the United States. Then think of the number of faculty at these organizations. Understand that most of these faculty are publishing research. Even if you are researching a very narrow topic, there is a lot of ground to cover in the research literature.
Not only is academic publishing an enormous endeavor, it is also an enormous commercial industry. And as with any commercial industry, academic publishing companies are in business to make a profit. Academic journal subscriptions cost a lot. Unlike a personal subscription to a magazine, or even an individual subscription to a journal, libraries must pay an institutional subscription fee so they can make the research available to faculty and students. Sometimes it can cost several thousand dollars for one journal title! As a university student, the cost of academic publishing is largely hidden from view because your tuition and fees are not paid directly to the library to fund journal subscriptions. However, your institution allocates hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions each year to pay for the privilege to access research you need for your education.
But not all privileges to information are the same. Recall a question from exercise three: Types of databases. You were asked to explore how many databases were licensed by your college or university library. That number will range widely based on the size of the institution, and on the level of financial resources available to the library. If you are a student at a large research institution, it is likely that you will have access to many research resources going beyond article databases to resources like datasets, archives, electronic book collections, advanced computation, etc. If you are a student at a smaller or medium sized university with fewer financial resources, the scope of your access will likely be narrower simply because your institution can’t afford as many resources.
Is the size of the university’s library budget a legitimate reason to deny students access to knowledge? Should a student at a private university with a large endowment have greater access to research than a low-income rural student at a small state college?
This question becomes increasingly problematic when you understand that the researchers creating this knowledge and publishing the research (often your professors) receive no pay or royalties from their publications, and, in the case of much U.S. STEM research, their research labs and projects are frequently funded by public grants from the state or federal government, that is to say, tax-payer funds. These researchers hand over their author’s rights to publish their research, which your university library then must pay the commercial publisher high subscription rates so you can read it!
If we expand our view from the United States to the globe, access to research limited to only those who can pay the premium denies knowledge, opportunity, and innovation to students and researchers in developing nations. Equity of access to research output, especially access to publicly funded research, is a contentious problem, but not one without some innovative solutions.
Over the last 25 years, a growing number of researchers have chosen to communicate their work by using a publishing model that removes this equity gap. Open Access (OA) Publishing replicates the peer review process and the model of scholarly journal publishing except that the articles are freely available on the internet without subscriptions, paywalls or article purchasing fees.
OA publishing levels the playing field, allowing students, regardless of status, wealth, or institutional affiliation, to identify and access important research in their field. Your university library makes many subscription-based journals available to you without cost. But you also have at your disposal OA books and journals, many of which are included in the article databases. Much of the OA literature can be found within Open Access subject repositories. It is also possible to explore OA literature in your discipline with a tool like Google Scholar. Any time you perform a Google Scholar search and you are able to retrieve access to articles without going through a paywall, you are accessing an OA article.
As an author (yes, the work you are doing is a contribution to knowledge in the field) you may have opportunities to publish your work in a journal or at a conference. Ask your professor, is the journal Open Access? Are the conference proceedings Open Access? If you aren’t publishing, your work can still be made available in an open format. As you consider whether you want your work to be available to future students and researchers, you can elect to make your work available by using any of several different free publishing tools on the web. Ask your librarians if there are any opportunities to add your work to your university’s institutional repository (IR).
An IR is an online database containing the Open Access research and creative output of the faculty of a university. Faculty from the institution voluntarily deposit their work in the repository which is then made freely available. IRs often contain other kinds of creative output in addition to faculty research such as student research, and Open Educational Resources (OER).
Open Access subject repositories are websites where researchers in a field deposit their work so that it can be accessed free of charge by anyone. OA Subject repositories contain journal articles and working papers as well as other research products such as datasets. The authors submit the work and provide descriptive metadata about it to the repository. The repository platform serves a similar function to a library article database in that they are both searchable databases. The difference being that all the material contained within the subject repository is freely available. The OpenDOAR or, Directory of Open Access Repositories is an excellent place to identify a subject repository in your field.
Want to learn more? Visit these resources
Suber, P. (2012). Open access. MIT Press. https://openresearchlibrary.org/content/897269fe-ab6a-48ca-bde8-90d741a200a4
Harrington, C., & Scott, R. E. (2023). Intersections of Open Access and Information Privilege in Higher Education and Beyond. NASIG Proceedings, 37(0), Article 0. https://doi.org/10.3998/nasig.4302
Exercise 5: OA resources
- Perform a search for Open Access journals in a regular search engine like Google or Bing. Then perform the same search in a privacy conscious search engine (DuckDuckGo, for example). Compare the two search results, and make a list of the top 5 sites you would like to remember for doing additional research.
- Perform a search (in your preferred search engine) for Open Access resources in your discipline, (Sociology or Psychology for example). Make a list of your 3-5 top choices of sites that you think will help you identify high quality Open Access research. Keep in mind whether the sites you select are independent or if they are associated with a single publisher.
Reading Academic Literature
Once you have identified some articles related to your topic, you have to actually read them! Reading more than 20 articles, each of which are 20-50 pages can be an overwhelming prospect. You need to approach this work intelligently. It would be difficult indeed to read every word of every article start to finish. So you won’t do that. Your reading should focus on finding out if a source is useful to you. In this stage of the research process, you will read the abstract first, and maybe the introduction, and then determine whether it is worth reading the rest. Note the structure of the article and see if there are sections that are more relevant to your work than others. You might flip to a relevant section first, rather than reading the entire thing from beginning to end. This is especially useful for longer sources like books or lengthy reports where you may only need to read the beginning, and then go directly to the relevant section, like the results and conclusions. Finally, skim the rest of the article and review the list of references. Here you will find additional research that could be important to your work. Your librarians may have a guide to reading peer reviewed articles that contains additional reading strategies.
The Research Process is a Cycle
Instructor Notes: Evaluation of this exercise should help instructors understand students' comprehension of the research process. If time affords it, a one on one check-in with the students about their progress and comfort level with the process might be warranted. At this point, engaged students will have collected several potential studies from their exploration. A lack of any relevant articles might indicate a struggling student. Intervention from a partner librarian for support may be effective.
Many students think that research is a straight line: choose a topic, research the topic, write the research paper. But it is helpful and productive to think of research as a cyclical process. The research process is not a linear set of tasks. It is a cyclical set of practices, each of which builds upon the earlier ones. Everything you have done to this point is part of the research process. It would be unusual for you to have a complete literature review after searching for articles in library databases just one time. If you find a few articles on your first attempt, the knowledge you gain from reading those articles will surely send you back into the databases to identify additional work. You repeat searches with alternate keywords and in the ways you combine those keywords. You search different databases for additional material. The bibliographies of the articles you find will also help you discover relevant literature. As you read more sources and allow your ideas to change, your focus narrows. You will find yourself eliminating sources that are too broad, too specific, or tangential. Your search for relevant sources should continue throughout the writing process.
Exercise 6: Recording your process
By performing these exercises you have been learning about research strategies. It can be very useful to think about your own research process and the steps you take to find information. Write a 50-100 word narrative describing your research process. Include how you might be more efficient or thorough in researching your next project.
Citing Sources (Credit where credit is due)
Throughout your literature review you will be making references to research and to authors you have identified. Depending on the style you are required to use (APSA, APA, ASA, MLA, etc.), the form for these in-text citations will differ. Make sure you are using a style guide for accuracy. The most important point is that giving accurate attribution to other people’s ideas in your work is essential. Not only is it safeguarding you against accusations of academic dishonesty (plagiarism), but correct and appropriate citation is an important part of sharing knowledge and showing respect to your fellow authors. While it is sometimes difficult to visualize, it is important to remember that your work is in conversation with the work of other scholars. Often these scholars are active researchers for whom citation is a valued part of the scholarly conversation.
Keeping track of it all
Instructor Notes: More than any other, this exercise will require a review of available support from your institution. Because Zotero is Open Source software, there are many freely available web pages and tutorials to support its use. Bibliographic Management Software is not a required skill or tool, but it is an extremely useful and time saving resource once the initial learning curve is overcome.
Doing research in academic literature is a complex process. It generates a lot of information from several different sources. It can quickly become difficult to manage all of the different threads of inquiry generated by asking a research question. So how do you keep track of so many articles, chapters, search terms, pdfs, etc.? Some people keep index cards, others keep downloaded articles in a folder.
Zotero is a free bibliographic management tool that will help you organize all the research you discover. It has add-ins for word processing applications (including google docs) which allow you to insert in-text citations in a paper, and it will generate your bibliography for you using a citation style chosen from dozens of different options. Zotero also creates a searchable database of the articles you discover, allows you to organize them into projects or themed collections, create tags, make annotations, and access them from the web, and synched to your computer. The Zotero browser add-on allows you to create citations from articles, books or webpages and you can import citations from article databases or library catalogs. Zotero is also a powerful way to share research. It allows you to create and follow groups of other Zotero users so you and your fellow researchers can share the literature you discover.
Your librarians may have created guides or offer workshops in how to use Zotero or other commercial bibliographic management software. Two major commercial offerings similar to Zotero are Refworks and Mendeley. Libraries with enough resources will license these tools (buy access) for student use.
A major benefit to using bibliographic management software is that you can return to your personalized database of citations for project after project throughout your college career and beyond if you continue into graduate school. Because it is free to use, your access to Zotero will not cease after you graduate.
Exercise 7: Bibliographic Management Software
Answer the following questions and complete the tasks.
- List the tools available at your institution to help you manage references and articles.
- Does your library offer support for one or more of these tools?
- Create an account in one of these tools and create 5 references to articles, books, chapters, or websites. You can create these reference manually (step by step, adding the title, author, publisher, etc.) or you can import one or more references from a library database*. Ideally you could use any or all the references you have identified in this assignment.
- Explore the tool’s functionality by creating a list of works cited from the references you entered.
*Ask a librarian for support in accomplishing this task if you have questions.
Conclusion
If you have read to this point and completed the exercises you will be much more familiar with how to successfully find scholarly research for use in your own writing. Let’s review the main points of the resource.
- No matter what you have chosen to research, it is important to understand the context of the topic within the scholarly discipline or subdiscipline. There are many excellent reference resources like encyclopedias and handbooks that can help you learn basic information about your area of interest, and taking the time to read background information will support your ability to find relevant academic articles and ultimately save you time.
- In crafting your research question, it is important to understand the parameters of the project. How much time to do have to complete the work? Is it a question that is actively debated in the field (or have previous researchers come to conclusive answers)?
- What form of a literature review will you need to complete? How exhaustive will your exploration be? Can you be satisfied with a finite number of relevant articles to summarize or synthesize?
- What is your plan for searching the scholarly literature in your discipline? How many library article databases do you have at your disposal and/or how many Open Access repositories will you search before you have adequately covered the research in your discipline/subdiscipline?
- Are there credible or authoritative voices relevant to your research topic that fall outside the accepted academic boundaries? How might you find and incorporate the knowledge of underrepresented points of view in your work?
- Recall that research is a cyclical process. How has the information you find in one round of searching informed your additional inquiries? How will the work you do on this project inform your future research practice?
- Accurate and complete attribution (citation) of other authors’ ideas is essential for your work if it is to be honest and taken seriously.
- Bibliographic management software tools such as Zotero (free and Open Source), or Refworks and Mendeley (commercial, subscription-based) are powerful database tools that save you work and allow you to build a robust personal database of research articles.
Lastly, remember that the librarians at your college or university are highly trained professionals and researchers themselves. It is their job to support you in successfully accomplishing your academic goals, so do yourself a favor and use their expertise!
References
This Open Educational Resource reuses information from the following works. Each is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0.
Conlin, K., & Jennings-Roche, A. (2021). Strategic information literacy: Targeted knowledge with broad application. Pressbooks. https://ubalt.pressbooks.pub/strategicil/
Hand, L., Ryan, E., & Sichler, K. (2019). Introduction to Communication Research: Becoming a Scholar (2022 ed.). Galileo Open Learning Materials. https://oer.galileo.usg.edu/communication-textbooks/3
Kessler, J., Williams, C., Costello, V., & Armstrong, A. R. (2023). Writing for Inquiry and Research. Windsor & Downs Press. https://doi.org/10.21900/wd.19