Developing General Library & Online Research Skills

Intended learning outcomes of this tutorial. You should be able to:

  1. identify & understand different ways of eliciting information
  2. investigate & apply a variety of information searching techniques for research
  3. learn how to use online resources efficiently

Research Techniques

When you conduct research, you are essentially trying to identify the relevant facts about a particular subject. There are two methods to conduct research and collect data/information. You can ask questions to collect information from people, or scan books and use keyword searches to collect published information. Let’s begin with the former.

Asking Questions

Asking questions can be divided into two conceptually different stages, one that deals more with the general facts concerning your topic, the other allowing you to understand the implications and applications of your research better. Both are equally important because simply reporting the facts, and not presenting them in the right context and/or appropriate manner for your particular audience, or failure to understand their implications, may cause unsatisfactory results. In a workplace environment, this may lead to having dissatisfied customers, and in an adademic environment, to failing all or part of a course if you’re a student, or to being subjected to severe criticism by your peers if you’re a researcher. Thus, the same principles of using common sense and showing good judgement in your analyses or procedures apply to both contexts.

Stage 1 – Ask basic questions that will lead you to essential information about your topic. These may include:

Stage 2 – Ask questions about its relevance or significance that help you understand the context of your topic.

Of course, not all of the above are always equally relevant to every topic under investigation, and it is up to you to identify the most reasonable questions pertaining to your own research (or scenario). Furthermore, some questions might not be immediately obvious at the start of a research project, but their relevance may only become apparent during the course of your investigation.

Try to identify some of the relevant questions you would need to ask while conducting a study on how to improve mobile phone technology for senior citizens. Write down these questions in the text box below and compare them with your classmates.

Collecting Information From People

You can use different techniques to collect information from people:

  1. surveys
  2. interviews
  3. questionnaires
  4. observing & testing

This is extremely useful if you want some qualitative information/answers/support to/for your questions or your topic. For instance, surveys and questionnaires are useful to get statistics about the market. Interviews are useful to get verbal feedback about a product. Tests are useful to compare and contrast different products, and observe participants’ reactions/results.

The findings from such surveys are useful as evidence or proof, and can be used to support your claims or recommendations. They can provide answers to your questions.

Form small groups and think about how you could implement some of the strategies listed above in investigating the needs and preferences of elderly people regarding the use of mobile phones, and then draft some samples. If you’re unfamiliar with the techniques introduced above, do an online search for suitable examples and evaluate them critically.

Collecting Published Information

Collecting published information can be easy if you know the right strategies. Just remember, though, the easiest strategies, i.e. those that provide you with some answers most quickly, may not always be the most reliable ones. Thus, for instance, even if you teachers in school may have told you that Wikipedia is a great source of information, the fact that many different people who have rather diverse levels of knowledge can contribute to this popular resource may at times make it less reliable than you think. Therefore, even if you may well want to use it to get a quick overview over a specific topic/area of knowledge, once you have done so, you need to evaluate the information found there critically by verifying it through other sources.

Developing a Search Strategy

To look for relevant information on your topic, which steps would you do first?

  1. Go to the library. Find the area where books in your specialty area are kept, then start searching the rows and rows of books for a book title that might be suitable for your topic.
  2. Go to any computer. Log on to any search engine (e.g. Google, Yahoo). Type in some relevant keywords. Click on any URLs that might be suitable websites for your topic.
  3. Go to any computer. Log on to a library’s website. Use their search engine and type in some relevant keywords. Click on any links to books, periodicals, magazines, theses, journals that might be suitable for your topic.

Some questions for you to think about:

Below are some of the categories of information that you can use to search for items if you open many library websites around the world to do a library catalogue search:

  1. Do you know what each of these categories relates/refers to? If not, find out what through an online search...
  2. See whether you can search for all of them on the GDUFS Library page.

For additional, possibly more subject-specific information, you can also use special databases or journals by accessing them through the main library web page. We’ll talk more about this further below.

Research Tips

Using Keywords/Key Phrases

It can generally be quite useful to start by using a computer and typing in keywords to search for information. You can use the Library Catalogue to find new information – books, theses, journals, periodicals – from options such as Title, Subject, Keyword. If you go into an Internet search engine, though, you need to make your keywords/key phrases as accurately as possible. If you’re looking for exact phrases, use double quotation marks ("…") to specify your search.

However, on-line databases generally tend to be the most efficient way to identify resources for your topic. If you access the databases using the correct keywords, they will generally produce lists of the most relevant academic journal articles. These articles are essentially a list of references you can use. Furthermore, articles are quicker to read than books and tend to be more up-to-date. Therefore, it might often be simpler and more helpful to access journals than books.

Electronic Resources

You should be familiar with ways of using the library on-line catalogue. Here are two useful tips you may not know:

  1. Apart from searching by ‘author’ and ‘title’, trying clicking on ‘keyword’ search from the same menu. This method often leads you to a surprising number of books on your topic.
  2. It is often easier to get hold of books that are in the Reserve section of the Library. This is because books in this section cannot be taken out of the library for more than a few hours, and thus are usually readily accessible. However, you should obviously not only rely on them, especially not if a different title ‘looks more promising’.

Online Databases of Science Abstracts

There are a number of on-line databases of abstracts that you can access through the online catalogue. To use them:

  1. Prepare the keywords that you will need for your search on the particular sub-topic(s) you’ve been assigned for your project. Do this carefully. Tip: Keywords usually need to be quite specific – for example, the keyword ‘cell’ is much too general and will result in a list of many thousands of abstracts. Narrower and more specific keywords are essential.
  2. Go to the Library homepage.
  3. Choose the link to ‘Proquest ARL(Academic Research Library-学术期刊全文数据库)-Proquest’. There are many other databases which you can explore later.
  4. Click on the link below the title.
  5. Select ‘Business’ to narrow down your subject area.
  6. Select ‘Scholarly journals’ to narrow down the results further.
  7. Click on ‘Advanced search’.
  8. Take some time to explore the options for limiting your search, then type in the keywords ‘business’ and ‘writing’ into the search boxes on the left, narrow down your search to look in only ‘Document title – TI*’ , and click the ‘Search’ button.
  9. Look through the titles that appear. You can click on ‘Preview’ to see the abstract summary. Look through the abstracts and select those titles that are relevant to your topic. Many titles also have ‘Full Text’ links to PDFs or web pages, apart from information about citation, etc.
    Tip 1: Only consider abstracts for articles or books that you can find in our library, or that can be downloaded.
    Tip 2: Make sure you distinguish between research-based articles and theoretical articles. Which are you searching for?
    Tip 3: Always keep a careful record of your search.

Electronic journals

Some full-text journals are also available on-line through the library catalogue.

Use your computer and access the library catalogue, electronic resources and the WWW. Search for suitable information regarding the term ‘corporate social responsibility’ in published information such as:

  1. Books
  2. Journals
  3. Online databases
  4. Websites
  5. Newspapers

How do you decide which book or article to choose? What are your criteria?

© 2013 Martin Weisser; last edited: 15-Oct-2013 17:07:59