UED 692: Research Methods

No matter where you are searching, it is important to evaluate the resources in your results list to ensure that they are of sufficient quality to support your research. These steps in the research process are key, because they help you focus your research on high quality resources that will support your project and will help steer you away from unqualified materials that will either supply you with misinformation or waste your time.

Below is a list of questions that you can ask when reviewing research materials to help determine if they are relevant and appropriate for your research needs. 

Research your Research

•     Learn about the publisher:​
  •     Who is the publisher?​
  •     What is their mission statement?​
  •     How are they funded?​
•     Check the article or publication’s influence:​
  •     This may be represented as the number of downloads, number of times cited, or using a metric like Impact Factor​
  •     Impact factor is based on the average number of times articles published by a specific journal in a 2-year span by a journal were cited in academic publications in the following year​
  •     This may indicate an author, publisher, or specific work is highly regarded or influential in the field.
•     Find the Author's Academic Background:​
  •     Find the author’s academic or researcher profile (search engines are a good starting point)​
  •     Does the author actively teach, work, or do research in the field full time?​
  •     What focus does the author have across their academic work?​
•     Look at the Author's Prior Publications:​
  •     Has the author published on this topic before? (Google Scholar and ORCiD are good tools for this)​
  •     Are they consistent with the topics, methodology, or theoretical frameworks in their publications?​
•     Learn About Any Co-authors or Collaborators:​
  •     Repeat any of the questions about the author if there are multiple authors listed for the article​.
  •     Has a researcher worked with the same people multiple times? These researchers may also have relevant publications.​

Evaluate While You Read

•     Read the abstract:​
  •     Are they using the same research methods or theoretical view as you?​
  •     Does this material consider important angles of your research question?​
•     Check the publication date:​
  •     Is this research up-to-date?​
  •     If the article was published outside the "window of recency" for your field, is the research highly influential or otherwise significant? ​
    • Recency varies by field. For example, medical and computer science research may be considered out of date much faster than literary studies or history.​
•     Examine the article while you read:​
  •     Does the author acknowledge counter arguments or different approaches to their topic?​
  •     Does the author include accurate and adequate citations – are their ideas contributing to ongoing research?

You may have noticed that these questions revolve around shared key ideas:

• Authority: who wrote this resource?
• Currency: when was this written?
• Influences: how is the author approaching the topic and what impacts may be altering their viewpoint?
• Motivation: why was this resource created?

While you can apply any combination of these questions to your research materials, there are several resource evaluation frameworks that give you an easy way to remember and apply these ideas during the research process. 

Each of these frameworks have their own strengths -- read the outlines below and click the links to learn more and see which ones work best for you. 

• ABCD
  • Authority, Bias, Currency, Documentation 
• CCOW
  • Credentials, Claims, Objectives, Worldview
• CRAAP
  • Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, Purpose
• SIFT
  • Stop, Investigate, Find, Trace

Once you have identified a strong resource by building a successful search and applying an evaluation framework, citation mining can help you make the most of all that hard work and find more high-quality resources! This will also help you learn more about the scholarly conversation around your research topic, since you can look for how the author of this resource was influenced by earlier academic works.

All scholarly/peer-reviewed resources will include citations and a list of references. These elements are not only essential for appropriate research practice, but they also offer you a fantastic tool for locating additional resources.

The following tips can help you use citations and reference lists effectively:

• Look for frequently cited resources and authors. Use the bibliographic information (author, title, publication date, publisher, etc.) provided in the citation/list of references to locate the original document and learn more about the information that it contains.
• Look up items from the list of references that center on your research topic and check their lists of references to locate resources that are common in the field.
  • This is particularly helpful when performing a literature review, which asks you to present information on the important research coverage of a given topic.
• Look up items from the list of references that center on your research topic and look for recurring word and phrases related to your topic. This can help you expand your vocabulary on the subject and you can use these as additional search terms as you continue to collect resources.