CICS 305 Class Visit
What is Your Topic?
Not sure where to start? Try these tips:
- Start where you are. Think about topics that might be of interest to you. What do you already know? What would you like to know? What class papers or discussion caught your attention? Skim over your reading list or textbook for ideas.
- Seach for relevant current events. Twitter, ScienceDaily's Computers and Math section, the New York Times, and popular science magazines, such as WIRED or Ars Technica, often cover recent events in the field.
- Look for trade magazine articles in your area of interest. Peruse the ACM Magazines, particularly Communications of the ACM and XRDS Crossroads. (Full text is available to UMass through the ACM Digital Library.)
Narrow Your Research Question
- Tutorial: Developing a Research FocusLear about pre-research techniques to determine the scope and depth of your research focus.
Document Your Research
Use a Research Log to document the choices you make during your research process. A Research Log can be as simple or complex as you need it to be, but it should collect the following basic information, to help you track and think critically about your research.
- Your research question and keywords
- The databases that you searched
- Criteria used to refine your search
- The sources you've identified and their characteristics
You can also use this tool to keep notes on your progress. Write about what's been successful, what's frustrated you, or take notes about what you're reading. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, elaborate, or even academic -- just a way to keep a log of your thoughts and what you've found.
Moving from Research Question to Research Strategy
Moving from a research question to an effective search strategy requires that you:
- break your research question down into its core concepts,
- identify alternative keywords for those concepts,
- combine your keywords with boolean connectors to create a strategy
- iterate different combinations of keywords and concepts until you find a search method that returns relevant results!
For Example!
Keyword Searching
Keywords are the words that you use when searching online catalogs and library databases. Select your keywords carefully; the more targeted they are, the more efficient your searches will be.
- Keywords should represent the most important concepts in your topic.
- Try multiple variants or synonyms of your keywords. Sometimes you may have to do several searches to identify keywords related to your topic.
- If you find a good and relevant source for your topic, look for additional keyword synonyms in the title, abstract, and subject headings.
Modified from Choosing and Using Keywords Tutorial, CREDO Instruct
- Tutorial: Choosing and Using KeywordsTry this tutorial to practice selecting refining, and expanding keywords.
Keyword Search Tips!
Are you getting too many results? Narrow your search by:
- Put keyword phrases into quotations, IE: "artificial intelligence"
- Use AND between search terms; Use NOT to eliminate irrelevant terms
- Use fielded searches, IE: search in the title or abstract fields
- Try additional synonyms for your keywords, look at subject headings of relevant results for ideas
- Use filters to narrow down by time frame, format, etc.
- Try a different, more specialized database
- Review your research question, is it too broad?
Are you getting too few search results? Broaden your search by:
- Use OR between search terms
- Nest keyword synonyms together using OR, IE: (iphone OR smartphone OR mobile phone)
- Search Full Text or All Text rather than fields
- Use truncation to find word variants, IE: autis* will return autistic or autism
- Try alternative search terms
- Try a different, more general database
- Review your research question, is it too narrow?
Search Techniques Tutorials
- Tutorial: Search Techniques, Part 1Use this tutorial to familiarize yourself with strategic searching. You will learn the purpose and uses of natural language and Boolean operators to broaden and narrow the scope of a search.
- Tutorial: Search Techniques, Part 2Use this tutorial to learn strategic search approaches to navigate scholarly databases including advanced search techniques for broadening and narrowing the scope of a search.
