How To Find Research Question In An Article
Learning Objectives
- identify preliminary research strategies (developing a research program, basic online searching, using Google)
- identify intermediate inquiry strategies (advanced online searches, finding scholarly sources and primary and secondary sources, librarian consultation)
- identify advanced search strategies (advanced library searches, library databases, keyword and field searches)
Introduction
In that location are lots of reasons to include research in an bookish essay.
-
Reading what others have written about a topic clearly helps you become better-informed almost it - Sharing what you've learned about the topic in your essay demonstrates your knowledge
- Quoting or paraphrasing experts in the field establishes your own credibility as an author on the topic
- Responding to what's already been said on a topic, by including your unique perspective, allows your essay to enter the broader chat, and shape how others feel about the event
And, the biggest motivation of all: it's a requirement for an assignment (considering your instructor wants you to do all of those things above).
We've learned that the writing process is a series of flexible steps that aid yous break a large project into smaller, bite-size pieces. Research is likewise a procedure. Information technology'due south not something that can exist accomplished well in one single step, but rather done in stages, with fourth dimension for reflection and assay in betwixt.
The first part of that process is simply knowing where to look, and that's what we'll explore in the post-obit pages.
Preliminary Research Strategies
The get-go step towards writing a inquiry paper is pretty obvious: detect sources. Not everything that you find will be good, and those that are adept are not always hands found. Having an idea of what y'all're looking for–what will most help yous develop your essay and enforce your thesis–will help guide your procedure.
Case of a Research Process
A good research procedure should go through these steps:
- Determine on the topic.
- Narrow the topic in order to narrow search parameters.
- Create a question that your research will address.
- Generate sub-questions from your primary question.
- Make up one's mind what kind of sources are best for your argument.
- Create a bibliography as yous get together and reference sources.
Each of these is described in greater detail below.
Books, books, books …Do non start research haphazardly—come upwards with a plan first.
Pre-Research
A enquiry plan should brainstorm after y'all tin can clearly place the focus of your argument. First, inform yourself about the basics of your topic (Wikipedia and general online searches are corking starting points). Be sure you've read all the assigned texts and carefully read the prompt as you gather preliminary information. This stage is sometimes called pre-research.
A broad online search volition yield thousands of sources, which no one could be expected to read through. To make it easier on yourself, the next pace is to narrow your focus. Think about what kind of position or opinion you can take on the topic. What almost information technology strikes you as virtually interesting? Refer dorsum to the prewriting stage of the writing process, which will come in handy here.
Preliminary Search Tips
- Information technology is okay to start with Wikipedia as a reference, but do not use it as an official source. Look at the links and references at the bottom of the page for more ideas.
- Use "Ctrl+F" to find certain words within a webpage in social club to spring to the sections of the article that interest you lot.
- Utilise Google Avant-garde Search to be more specific in your search. Y'all can also use tricks to be more specific within the main Google Search Engine:
- Use quotation marks to narrow your search from simply tanks in WWII to "Tanks in WWII" or "Tanks" in "WWII".
- Discover specific types of websites by adding "site:.gov" or "site:.edu" or "site:.org". You can also search for specific file types like "filetype:.pdf".
- Click on "Search Tools" under the search bar in Google and select "Any time" to see a listing of options for time periods to help limit your search. Y'all tin can find information simply in the past calendar month or year, or even for a custom range.
Employ features already available through Google Search like Search Tools and Advanced Search to narrow and refine your results.
As y'all narrow your focus, create a listing of questions that you'll need to respond in lodge to write a skillful essay on the topic. The research procedure will assistance you answer these questions.
Another part of your research plan should include the type of sources you lot want to gather. Keep rails of these sources in a bibliography and jot down notes about the book, article, or document and how it will be useful to your essay. This volition salve yous a lot of time afterward in the essay process–you lot'll thank yourself!
Level Up Your Google Game
10 Google Quick Tips
We all know how to Google…but we may not be getting as much out of information technology as nosotros'd like. The following video walks through ten piece of cake tips for getting you closer to what yous're looking for.
Getting More than Out of Google
For a visual representation of additional online search tips, click the paradigm beneath.
Click on this Infographic to open up it and learn tricks for getting more out of Google.
Intermediate Search Strategies
"Popular" vs. "Scholarly" Sources
Research-based writing assignments in higher will often require that you use scholarly sources in the essay. Different from the types of manufactures institute in newspapers or general-interest magazines, scholarly sources accept a few distinguishing characteristics.
| Popular Source | Scholarly Source | |
|---|---|---|
| Intended Audience | Broad: readers are not expected to know much about the topic already | Narrow: readers are expected to exist familiar with the topic earlier-manus |
| Writer | Journalist: may have a broad area of specialization (state of war contributor, media critic) | Field of study Matter Expert: often has a caste in the subject and/or all-encompassing experience on the topic |
| Enquiry | Includes quotes from interviews. No bibliography. | Includes summaries, paraphrases, and quotations from previous writing done on the discipline. Footnotes and citations. Ends with bibliography. |
| Publication Standards | Article is reviewed by editor and proofreader | Commodity has gone through a peer-review process, where experts on the field have given input before publication |
Where to Find Scholarly Sources
The first step in finding scholarly resources is to expect in the right place. Sites similar Google, Yahoo, and Wikipedia may be expert for pop sources, but if you lot desire something you lot can cite in a scholarly paper, you demand to notice it from a scholarly database.
2 common scholarly databases are Academic Search Premier and ProQuest, though many others are also available that focus on specific topics. Your schoolhouse library pays to subscribe to these databases, to make them available for you to use every bit a student.
You take another incredible resources at your fingertips: your college's librarians! For help locating resource, yous will discover that librarians are extremely knowledgeable and may assistance you uncover sources yous would never have found on your own—perhaps your school has a microfilm collection, an extensive genealogy database, or access to another library's catalog. You volition non know unless y'all utilize the valuable skills available to you, so be certain to discover out how to get in bear on with a research librarian for back up!
Principal and Secondary Sources
A primary source is an original document. Primary sources can come up in many unlike forms. In an English paper, a primary source might exist the poem, play, or novel you lot are studying. In a history paper, it may exist a historical document such as a letter, a journal, a map, the transcription of a news broadcast, or the original results of a study conducted during the fourth dimension menstruation nether review. If you conduct your own field enquiry, such every bit surveys, interviews, or experiments, your results would too be considered a chief source. Main sources are valuable because they provide the researcher with the data closest to the time flow or topic at hand. They besides allow the writer to conduct an original analysis of the source and to draw new conclusions.
Secondary sources, by dissimilarity, are books and articles that analyze principal sources. They are valuable because they provide other scholars' perspectives on primary sources. Y'all can also clarify them to see if you agree with their conclusions or not.
Most college essays will use a combination of primary and secondary sources.
Google Scholar
An increasingly pop article database is Google Scholar. It looks similar a regular Google search, and information technology aims to include the vast majority of scholarly resources available. While it has some limitations (like not including a list of which journals they include), it's a very useful tool if you want to bandage a broad net.
Here are 3 tips for using Google Scholar effectively:
- Add your topic field (economics, psychology, French, etc.) as one of your keywords. If you lot just put in "criminal offense," for instance, Google Scholar will render all sorts of stuff from folklore, psychology, geography, and history. If your newspaper is on crime in French literature, your best sources may exist buried under thousands of papers from other disciplines. A set of search terms like "crime French literature modern" volition go yous to relevant sources much faster.
- Don't ever pay for an article. When you click on links to articles in Google Scholar, you may end upwards on a publisher'south site that tells yous that you tin can download the commodity for $20 or $30. Don't do it! You probably take admission to about all the published academic literature through your library resource. Write down the fundamental data (authors' names, title, periodical title, volume, issue number, year, page numbers) and go discover the article through your library website. If you don't have immediate full-text access, you may exist able to get it through inter-library loan.
- Use the "cited by" feature. If you get i corking hit on Google Scholar, you can apace run into a list of other papers that cited it. For example, the search terms "crime economic science" yielded this hit for a 1988 paper that appeared in a journal called Kyklos:
Google Scholar search results.
Using Google Scholar
Watch this video to go a better thought of how to utilize Google Scholar for finding manufactures. While this video shows specifics for setting up an business relationship with Eastern Michigan University, the same principles utilise to other colleges and universities. Inquire your librarian if you take more questions.
Avant-garde Search Strategies
As we learned earlier, the strongest articles to support your academic writing projects will come up from scholarly sources. Finding exactly what you need becomes specialized at this point, and requires a new ready of searching strategies beyond even Google Scholar.
For this kind of enquiry, you'll want to use library databases, as this video explains.
Many journals are sponsored by academic associations. Most of your professors belong to some big, full general 1 (such as the Modernistic Linguistic communication Association, the American Psychological Association, or the American Physical Society) and one or more than smaller ones organized around particular areas of involvement and expertise (such as the Association for the Study of Nutrient and Society and the International Association for Statistical Calculating).
Finding articles in databases
Your campus library invests a lot of fourth dimension and care into making sure you accept access to the sources you lot demand for your writing projects. Many libraries have online research guides that point you to the best databases for the specific subject field and, perhaps, the specific form. Librarians are eager to help y'all succeed with your research—it's their chore and they love it!—then don't exist shy well-nigh asking.
The following video demonstrates how to search within a library database. While the examples are specific to Northern Virginia Community College, the same general search tips apply to nearly all academic databases. On your school'south library homepage, you should be able to find a general search button and an alphabetized list of databases. Get familiar with your own school's library homepage to identify the full general search features, discover databases, and exercise searching for specific articles.
How to Search in a Database
Scholarly databases like the ones your library subscribes to work differently than search engines like Google and Yahoo considering they offer sophisticated tools and techniques for searching that can ameliorate your results.
Databases may await different just they can all exist used in like ways. Most databases can be searched using keywordsor fields. In a keyword search, yous want to search for the main concepts or synonyms of your keywords. A field is a specific part of a record in a database. Common fields that tin exist searched are author, title, subject area, or abstract. If y'all already know the writer of a specific article, entering their "Last Name, Offset Name" in the author field will pull more relevant records than a keyword search. This will ensure all results are articles written by the author and non manufactures almost that author or with that author'south proper noun. For example, a keyword search for "Albert Einstein" will search anywhere in the record for Albert Einstein and reveal 12, 719 results. Instead, a field search for Writer: "Einstein, Albert" will testify 54 results, all written by Albert Einstein.
Learn More than
This short video demonstrates how to perform a title search inside the pop EBSCO database, Academic Search Complete.
Practice: Keyword Search
1. Identify the keywords in the post-obit enquiry question: "How does repeated pesticide utilize in agriculture impact soil and groundwater pollution?"
Prove Answer
Pesticide, agriculture, soil, groundwater, pollution. You desire to focus on the master idea and can ignore common words that don't accept any meaning.
2. When you search, it's helpful to recall of synonyms for your keywords to examine diverse results. What synonyms tin you think of for the keywords identified in the question above?
Show Reply
Pesticide: agrochemicals, pest management, weed management, diazinan, malathion. Agriculture: farming, food crops, specific types of crops. Soil: world, clay, organic components. Groundwater: watershed, water resources, h2o table, aquatics, rivers, lakes. Pollution: ecology impact, degradation, exposure, acid rain
Sometimes you lot already take a citation (possibly y'all found it on Google Scholar or saw information technology linked through another source), but want to find the commodity. Everything you demand to locate your article is already constitute in the citation.
Many databases, including the library itemize, offer tools to assistance y'all narrow or aggrandize your search. Take advantage of these. The most common tools are Boolean searching and truncation.
Boolean Searching
Boolean searching allows you to utilise AND, OR, and NOT to combine your search terms. Here are some examples:
- "Endangered Species" AND "Global Warming" When you lot combine search terms with AND, you lot'll get results in which BOTH terms are present. Using AND limits the number of results because all search terms must appear in your results.
"Endangered Species" AND "Global Warming" will narrow your search results to where the ii concepts overlap.
- "Arizona Prisons" OR "Rhode Island Prisons" When you use OR, you'll get results with EITHER search term. Using OR increases the number of results because either search term can announced in your results.
"Arizona Prisons" OR "Rhode Island Prisons" volition increase your search results.
- "Miami Dolphins" NOT "Football"When yous use Not, y'all'll get results that exclude a search term. Using Not limits the number of results.
"Miami Dolphins" NOT "Football" removes the white circumvolve (football) from the dark-green search results (Miami Dolphins).
Truncation
Truncation allows you to search different forms of the same give-and-take at the aforementioned fourth dimension. Use the root of a word and add together an asterisk (*) equally a substitute for the word'due south ending. It tin salve time and increment your search to include related words. For example, a search for "Psycho*" would pull results on psychology, psychological, psychologist, psychosis, and psychoanalyst.
Self-Check
Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-basicreadingwriting/chapter/outcome-finding-sources/
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