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WRPR 101: Finding a Voice (HC)

Writing Program 101: Finding a Voice: Identity, Environment, and Intellectual Inquiry (Ladva) Fall 2023

Developing a Research Question

  • Research is an iterative process, meaning a cycle rather than a straight line. Assuming you have a research question in mind, you may follow a process like this:
     
    • Brainstorm search words -->
    • Explore initial search results -->
    • Refine your research question, and add or remove search words based on your initial search -->
    • Conduct a more targeted search -->
    • Evaluate results --> 
    • Check the sources used in the most promising articles or books-->
    • Repeat! -->
      <--  <--  <--

When getting started, I will look at handbooks or encyclopedias to see the way my topic is discussed.  The Oxford Bibliographies Onlne are helpful for this too.  

     For example, OBO's  "Class and Social Sturcture" refers me to the essay "Castas", a colonial Latn American system that categorized lower status people by race and social class.  Searching the term Castas opens up new primary sources (including images) as well as recent scholarly studies.

Google can sometimes provide more vocabulary and ideas too.  It is helpful to limit Google results to a specific group.     For example: 

U.S. colleges and universities -  site:.edu      castas women OR gender site:.edu

U.K. universities - site:.ac.uk      blacks atlantic history site:.ac.uk

  

Once you're ready to find scholarly literature, you'll want to use a library catalog, journal database, or research archive to help you find appropriate sources, but searches in background sources and Google can be helpful in the brainstorming phase.  For more information about developing a research question, see this tutorial.

Tips for Searching

Keywords allow you to construct a search that reflects multiple issues in your research question. Building sets of related concepts and looking for their overlaps gives you more relevant and precise results.  This approach is also called Boolean searching using the operators (AND, OR, NOT). 

For example, a search for economic* AND academ* will return items that contain both terms:

 

academ* OR universit* OR college* OR "higher education" makes a larger set concerning college and university education:


Resnais NOT Holocaust returns items that contain "Resnais" but not "Holocaust":




Phrase searching:

Enclose phrases in quotations marks.  This is an important strategy for getting exact results when searching phrases (e.g., "american psychological association") or conducting known-item searches for titles.

 

Nested Searching:

When pairing two or more keywords with another keyword, it is important to "nest" the related terms within a larger Boolean search.

For example, (research OR scholarship) AND humanities will return results for humanities and any one (or both) of the parenthetical terms. 

(Many catalogs or databases will have an "advanced search" option, which provides multiple search boxes to facilitate nested Boolean searching.)

 

Truncation and Wildcards:

Most catalogs and databases enable users to search variations of keywords by using truncation (*) or wildcard (e.g., ?, $, !) symbols.

For example, one could search for politic* to find poltic, politics, political, politician, and so on.

Wildcard searching works similarly: a search for wom?n will return results for both woman and women.