Information and Computer Sciences
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.
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.
Literature Searching Strategies
Keyword searching looks for your research concepts across the published literature. Keyword searching allows you to identify content that you do not already know exists and to discover as much as you can. The structure and features of the database you are using to search can make your results more relevant (truncation, fielded searches, filtering).
Use the main concepts of your research question/topic to find the range of work that exists on the topic.
Keyword searching takes time! It can introduce a lot of irrelevant results if your research question is too broad or too few if your question is too narrow. Iterate until you find a strategy that produces relevant results!
Citation chaining is a process for identifying new literature from an existing source. It allows you to use research papers to follow the conversation on a specific topic.
Start with an article that is relevant to your topic. Examine cited references (works cited, bibliography) of the original work to understand what it is building on -- backward chaining. Identify those articles that have cited the original article to see where the work is going -- forward chaining. Many databases provide the tools to do this, such as Google Scholar, Scopus, and the ACM Digital Library.
Citation chaining can help identify seminal articles, but it can also be very narrow and esoteric. Not easily scalable!
Establishing a good research question
To develop a research question that will give you targeted results, ask yourself a few questions:
- Who -- who, or what population, is your research about? (IE: children, nationality, human or animal)
- What -- what about this topic are you looking for? (trends, causes, treatments, data)
- When -- is there a specific time period you are concerned with?
- Where -- where does the research topic take place? (a specific country, urban or rural environment, natural or manmade)
- Why -- why is this research important?
Text and imge modified from Choosing a Topic and Developing a Research Question, SNHU
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!
Keyword Search Tips!
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.
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
- 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
- Try additional synonyms for your keywords, look at subject headings of relevant results for ideas
- Nest synonyms together using OR, IE: (iphone OR smartphone OR mobile phone)
- Search Full Text or All Text rather than specific fields
- Use truncation to find word variants, IE: autis* will return autistic or autism
- Try a different, more general database
- Review your research question, is it too narrow?
