A Step-by-Step Guide to Smart Research
The Research Process
To many, the word research is intimidating. It sounds serious, like something you need a gigantic brain and a white lab coat to perform. But chances are you have conducted research at least once in the past week. If you’ve gone online to find out biographical data on your favorite pop or movie star, or investigated when your favorite band is playing somewhere within driving distance this summer, or looked up the run times for a movie you want to see, you’ve done research. Indeed, with the prevalence of smart phones, people are increasingly doing research all the time, reaching out to databases around the world from devices they carry around in their pockets.
In fact, research is just another name for finding answers to questions. The primary difference between everyday research and the professional research conducted in universities and in business is the sophistication of the questions and complexity of the answers. But the methods for finding those answers are pretty much the same whether you’re looking for a coupon to your favorite restaurant or writing the definitive biography on a former President of the United States.
What follows are guidelines and hints for conducting sophisticated research.
Research Questions
Most experienced researchers frame their investigations in terms of a central question—or a series of closely related questions—the answers to which they seek in the library, on the Web, or through interviews.
My doctoral dissertation, for example, was written in answer to the question, “Where did English Departments Come From?” Related to that over-arching question were many other questions: “When did American colleges first institute English Departments?” “Why were English departments institutionalized?” “Which schools did so first?” “What were the early curricula like in those schools?” “What are modern curricula like in those schools?” “What do the similarities and differences between English Departments then and now tell us about how academic institutions work?”
The advantage to developing such questions early in the research process is that they point you toward subject headings and search descriptors that various search engines will recognize. They also help you make decisions about which information to read carefully, which to skim, and which to ignore altogether.
So step one of any research project is to figure out what you want to know and write it out in the form of a question. Add questions to the first one as they occur to you.
Conducting a Literature Search
With your research question firmly in mind, you need to conduct a literature search (this is known as the exploratory search in this class). It would be hard to overestimate the importance of this stage. The quality of your final paper depends almost entirely on the quality of the information you consult when attempting to answer your research question(s). If you select weak sources—dictionaries, encyclopedias, entry-level textbooks, and iffy websites—your paper won’t be informative enough to have bothered with. Instead, you need to consult well-reviewed books, articles in professional publications, and websites rich in verifiable content. Experienced researchers who are new to a topic do make use of specialized dictionaries and encyclopedias to acquaint themselves with basic background, elementary concepts, and technical vocabulary; but these sources seldom find their way into the research paper itself. See Evaluating Sources.
The written product of a lit search is a bibliography. How you transfer the information you glean from online search engines to a Microsoft Word document is a matter of personal preference. Some people prefer keeping a written record of their literature search. Others avoid this where possible by cutting and pasting publication details from search engines into Word documents on their laptops. How you keep track of the details you will need is not important. But it’s very important that you do develop a consistent system of some kind.
In this class, the lit search (bibliography) is called an Exploratory Search; but, like all bibliographies, it will need to by typed up according to the conventions of a style manual. MLA (Modern Language Association) and APA (American Psychological Association) are two popular citation styles; Lunsford’s Easy Writer Pocket Guide, the handbook required for this class, supports both styles. But you can use another style if your major requires you to.
Your lit search should include books, periodical articles, and websites. Plan on spending quite a few hours finding and recording sources related to your subject. The typical exploratory search features 30-40 individual citations; don’t stop looking until you have at least 35 sources.
Remember: the Exploratory Search is not a contract promising that you’ll read everything your search uncovers. Instead, you’ll use the titles gathered during your lit. search to refine your research question(s) and to determine key issues your paper must include in order to accomplish its primary purpose—i.e. to provide a thorough introduction to your topic.
Finding Quality Web Sources
After you’ve searched Maag Library’s Online and OhioLink’s online catalogs and research databases, conclude your literature search with a search of the World Wide Web.
Searching the Web for quality information is like panning for gold; you have to sift through mountains of mud and gravel to find a few nuggets. However, a well-informed researcher, armed with a few searching strategies can use the Web efficiently and make good use of the Internet’s many advantages.
Tips for Searching the Web: Unlike online library catalogs and fancy online databases, browsing the Web is not an exact science. But you should start with the words and phrases that yielded good results when you looked for books and periodical articles. These should give you a starting place for Web research. You can save yourself a lot of time by learning how to read web addresses. This will make it possible for you to weed out, at a glance, commercial pages which tend to feature very little quality information—or at least very little quality information for free.
How to Read a Web Address: Every Website has a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), a string of unique characters that functions as its “address” in cyberspace. There are five basic types of web pages.
Advocacy Pages: Web pages of this type are typically sponsored by an organization and attempt to inform and influence public opinion in a way that advances the group’s mission. Obvious examples of Advocacy Web Pages would include the official Websites of the Republican and Democratic Parties. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) are also advocacy groups with large websites. Usually, the URLs of advocacy pages end in .org (organization).
Commercial Pages: Web pages of this type are typically sponsored by business and marketing enterprises. Examples of commercial sites include the Ford Motor Company and Adobe Systems. It is in a company’s best interest to be accurate and honest about its own products and services. However, they have no obligation to tell you everything. Ford Motors, for example will undoubtedly tell you what kind of gas mileage one of their products will get, but won’t tell you that automobile exhaust is the single greatest source of greenhouse gasses—or that they’re suing the state of California to avoid having to improve the gas mileage of their cars. The URLs of commercial pages end in .com (commercial).
News Pages: All the major television and cable networks and many major newspapers have websites where you can check today’s headlines and read many articles for free. Web pages of this type also typically end in .com but are intended to provide you with accurate, complete, and up-to-the-moment news information. Or at least that’s what they teach in Journalism schools. In reality, the pressure to “scoop” other news outlets usually comes at the expense of accuracy and comprehensiveness. And, increasingly, news organizations have difficulty getting web-based customers to pay for news. This has led to a decrease in the number of reporters and the amount of money a news outlet can spend on gathering information for a story and a general decline in detail and accuracy in news reports of all kinds.
Information Pages: Web pages of this type are usually sponsored by educational institutions (.edu) or the government (.gov) with the intention of providing carefully checked, reliably factual information. But, beware, some .edu sites are personal pages hosted by a faculty or staff member’s home institution and thus their contents may or may not be fact-checked or officially sanctioned.
Personal Pages: Web pages of this type are published by individuals who may or may not be experts or affiliated with or authorized by governmental agencies, educational institutions, or professional organizations. Sites of this kind end in .com, .edu, or .net, depending on who’s hosting them. Many personal pages—particularly those hosted on .edu sites—have a tilde (~) and the name of the website’s author in their URLs.
Once you’ve found some promising sites, you should evaluate them—subjecting them to scrutiny just as you would a book or periodical article.
The Five Basic Criteria for Evaluating Web Sources
No doubt about it, the Web can be a powerful research tool. Many institutional Web sites—and not a few personal pages—are remarkable scholarly achievements and beautifully designed, making it easy for the visiting researcher to find current, reliable information—as well as links to many other useful references and resources. Nevertheless, on the whole, Web pages vary widely in authority, accuracy, objectivity, currency, and coverage. Thus, in addition to the basic questions a careful researcher asks of any text, Web researchers should also consider the following variables.
Accuracy: Remember, a bright 12-year-old with the right software can publish a Webpage and the content of most websites is not verified by editors or fact-checkers. Therefore, citing websites as sources of factual information is inherently risky. Ask yourself: Does the site feature a bibliography? Does it clearly identify the sources of the factual information it presents? Could you cross-reference its facts and claims with at least one other source? Is the information free of grammatical, spelling, and typographical errors? This may sound picky, but if someone finds using a spell-checker too much trouble, imagine how difficult he or she will find going to the library to verify the facts they present.
Authority: Often, it is difficult to determine the authorship of an online resource. Even if the authors’ name is listed, it may take some additional searching—or direct e-mail contact to discover your source’s qualifications. With obscure print authors, you can at least rely on the reputation of the publisher or publication to assess their claim to authority. However, there are few external measures of a Web author’s credibility or expertise beyond .edu or .gov in the URL.
Objectivity: Websites are frequently the only soapbox that some people have for crackpot ideas. Look for an explicit statement of the website’s goals or aims. Failing this, keep in mind that such design elements as choice of graphics, font, and use of color can provide clues to a site’s objectivity. If the site’s look seems designed to appeal to your appetites or your emotions rather than your head, be cautious.
Currency: Many Web pages are not dated. Even when dates do appear, they can refer to when the site was first created at the author’s computer, when the site was first published on the Web, or when the site was last revised.
Coverage: The best-designed sites feature site maps, tables of contents, or indices to give you an at-a-glance sense of how extensively they cover the issues related to a topic you’re interested in. Without some sort of overview, however, the reader has little choice but to read through the site. Even so, it should soon become apparent whether or not your source has consulted the research of others or whether they are taking the macro- or the micro-view of your subject.
Other Challenges Web Researchers Face
In addition to the questions one asks of any text (see Evaluating Sources), web researchers will have to overcome additional challenges.
The Hybrid Page: Some Web pages blend marketing and/or entertainment and/or advertising with information. In traditional media, information is usually distinguished from advertising and entertainment in all kinds of readily apparent ways. We know, for example, which are the articles in a magazine and which are the advertisements. And while there are legitimate concerns about whether or not television does a good job of critically analyzing the information it reports—or whether it adequately challenges attempts to manipulate its unique features—we know the difference between an entertainment program and the nightly news.
No such standards for ethical behavior exist for the Internet. Advocacy groups, marketing companies, and individuals frequently design their sites so that it is difficult to tell the difference between objective information and sales pitch—or even to distinguish between fact and fiction. Clearly, sites that do not feature bibliographies, links, or other verifiable references are suspect. But it’s good practice to check at least a couple of the references of the Web sites you are examining—especially if they are making extraordinary or controversial claims.
Software Requirements: Some websites will only operate properly when viewed through particular browsing software or if certain software is installed (e.g. QuickTime or Real Audio). It may be expensive or impossible to acquire the necessary software for some sites. Our campus labs are configured to resist or quickly purge all downloaded software and utilities to minimize the risk of virus infection or network overload. One of the facts of online research is that you may not be able to get access to all sites your Web browser identifies.
Instability of Web Pages: Unlike print media, web sites are not permanent. Authors occasionally take down their sites or move them to new URLs. The URL that took you to a really great site last week might not take you there this week. This is why it makes sense to take good notes and/or print information you think you’ll need as you go along. This is also why your Works Cited pages need to include the date that you visited any Website that you reference.
Broken Links: Unless the author of a Webpage frequently visits his or her own site and checks all the links, the inherent instability of Web pages will eventually lead to “broken links”—hyperlinks that no longer take you to the site indicated. In addition, unless the author of a high-quality Website has personally investigated every site that he or she has hyperlinked, it’s possible that some of the links they provide will be of poor quality.
Out of Context Pages: Occasionally, search engines retrieve pages out of their original site context. You might, for example, see this page if you “Googled” the search string “Evaluating Web Sources” because those terms appear frequently on this page. But, if you did so, you would not know who wrote this page or for what purposes—crucial pieces of information to help you evaluate its authority and objectivity.
To address this challenge, return to the site’s Home Page if you can. If no navigation link is available, don’t panic! Usually, the Home Page’s URL is contained in the address of Web pages associated with it. You can edit the URL of the page you are viewing in your Web browser’s search window. For example, if there were no Home Page link on Purdue’s Online Writing Lab’s “Using Modern Language Association (MLA) Format” page, you could still get there. OWL’s MLA page is located at: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/research/r_mla.html. By cutting everything to the right of its .edu designation and then pressing enter, your Web browser will take you to OWL’s home page.