Library 101 - Part 2: Research Methods and Strategies

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.

There are several resource evaluation frameworks that center around a few 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?

Each of these frameworks can be a powerful, time-saving tool 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. Read the outlines below from other libraries 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, make the most of all that hard work and mine that resource to see if you can use it as a springboard to find more high-quality resources!

All scholarly/peer-reviewed resources will include citations and a list of references. The inclusion of these elements is not only essential for appropriate research procedure by the author, but they also offer you a fantastic tool for locating additional resources.

Mining citations and references lists:

• 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, use the author's name to search for more materials by that author and see if they can help further your research, or look up the publication information to locate the journal/book/publisher of the materials and check that resource for more content related to your research.
   
• Look up items from the list of references that center on your research topic and check their lists of references to locate common, central 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 specific word and phrases related to your research topic to expand your vocabulary on the subject and use these search terms for future searches in addition to the ones that led you to your original high-quality resource.

In addition to mining references from an excellent resource, another extremely useful strategy is to seek out "Cited by" references. These "Cited by" references are materials that cite back the article that you are currently viewing. These citations indicate that the new materials relied on your existing article and can greatly enhance your understanding of the topic through newer findings, complementary research, or even a different conclusion.

Benefits of seeking out "Cited by" references:

•  By locating research that has cited an article that you have already identified as useful, you can find additional resources and interpretations of the topic of your research.
   
• If you need to locate more recently published materials (such as your professor has required materials form the last 5 years, but you have identified a strong resource that is 7 years old), the "cited by" reference can help you seek out more current materials that rely on the same high-quality research that you have already reviewed.
   
• Following the breadcrumb trail of "Cited by" references can help support your arguments or expose potential challenges by presenting you with multiple additional viewpoints that also relied on resources that you are also relying on.

Look for helpful links like these:

• In Google Scholar:

• In ProQuest: