Anna
This week we're going to be talking to one of the liaison librarians about how to do research. We'll be looking at in detail how to go about breaking a topic into keywords and how to improve the results you get from a search. So let me introduce Rachel, who is part of the academic liaison team. If you listen to podcast three, you will already know that the liaison librarians and how they work closely with your course team.
Anna
So Rachel, could you tell us what advice you'd give to students when they have a topic to research?
Rachel
Okay, well, I think it's important that students realise that there's more to research and there's simply hitting Google and trying to find an answer, and practical researching well, by the end of your assignment, instead of presenting an answer or a really neat conclusion, you might find Instead you've got more questions, and that's a good thing. It's also important to be aware that researching sometimes be a frustrating process. So you might find that the ideas you had lead to dead ends, you might have to change the direction for research. So we've tried to tell students to be prepared for the process of researching to feel quite messy. They'll probably take longer than you expect, and it's best to be flexible. About the direction your topic might take you in. Think you on a practical level, what sort of things should students do to get their research off to a good start to think, well, obviously, you need to know the parameters of your assignment. So always go back and read the brief carefully. Do things like check the word count? company expects to include things like journal articles or primary sources? And once you've got that clear, ask yourself what do you know already, so that's probably a good time to start jotting down the key words or main concepts. And these could be names of theorists or dates. It could be names of events or objects. If it's relevant to your topic, it could be a good idea to go back and look over lecture notes. We'll check through any reading this too may have been given. You could then maybe do a basic Google search or dip into Wikipedia to help scope out the topic further. Remember that you're not going to stay with Wikipedia, but you are using it to pull out more keywords and ideas. And you can add these new words to that list. Some people also find it helpful to talk through the topic with a friend talking to someone else can give you a fresh perspective on it, and give you new ideas and new examples for you to follow up. And you might also want to go back to the study hub web pages and look for advice there. And the bit to look at would be research skills in the Getting Started section.
Anna
Thank you and the next step would be to start to locate material for your assignment, do you think?
Yep, searching is a step you'd like to repeat several times. As you find out more, you'll end up adding to your keywords and then having to search again. So it's a process you repeat several times. So what would you recommend someone uses to find this material or can the lab research tool is always going to be a good starting point. They'll search the library collections. So the print books, the ebooks and the journal articles all in one go. So what you do is you type in some keywords and look through the results. It's likely you're gonna get a lot of results. So it's a good idea to use the filters to narrow this down. You might choose to narrow it down by year so you can focus on what's been recently published or by type of material. You might want to find a book and not an article.
Anna
So are there any clever tips you have for getting more focused results?
Rachel
One that I use quite a lot is a phrase search. So this is when he puts quotation marks around a phrase that you want to search for. For example, implements a marketing put quotation marks around influencer marketing, and that'll search for exactly that. There are two useful words to know about as well and that's and and all. So using ends will combine two ideas or keywords and we'll narrow the search down. For example, if you wanted to find out about the effects of poverty on crime try typing the words crime and poverty. If you wanted to search for two different concepts, okay, let's type all in between them. example for that would be cats or dogs. Also use all when you're searching for similar words, for example, university or higher education. Another example might be sneakers trainers, or skyscraper or multi story. So using all will broaden our search, you should get more results. And again, if that sounds confusing, the study hub research pages have more about how to improve your search. And there are also some short quizzes so you can test what you've learned.
Anna
And so what about if some individual help on a one to one basis?
Rachel
So we offer a drop in service, which runs in both libraries on both campuses. Plus, you can book an appointment with your librarian via the library subject guides.
So to sum up, give yourself a bit of time to do your research. Make sure you unpick your topic, think of different ways to describe it and remember there's lots of help available if you need it.
Anna
Thanks Rachel. In our next podcast, we'll be taking a look at some of the sources of information that you might be using to do your research. These will include peer reviewed journal articles, primary and secondary sources and we will also suggest ways you can make the most out of books.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
