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Return to the Doing Research page.
- Choose a topic
- State your topic as a question
- Do some background research
- Search for articles, books, statistics and other information
- Evaluate your information
- Organize and Cite your information
- Think about something interesting in a class discussion.
- Discuss your ideas with your instructor.
- Ask a librarian about resources for your topic.
2. State your topic as a question
- Asking a question will help you clarify your topic. There are probably thousands of articles and books on a topic like "poverty". Asking "What are the affects of government anti-poverty programs on childhood nutrition?" allows you focus on an interesting and manageable part of the larger topic.
- Think of alternate ways to describe the parts of your topic. You can find articles about getting enough nutrients using either "nutrition" or "malnutrition". For poverty try economic hardship or similar terms.
- Try some test searches for books in the library catalog or for journal articles in a database. If you get too many results you may want to narrow your search further. If you get too few results, you may need to think of a broader topic or think of alternate ways to describe the parts of your topic.
- General sources like encyclopedias can give you an overview of a topic, put your question in context and suggest search terms.
4. Search for articles, books, statistics and other information
- Ask a Librarian for help. We can ask you questions about your topic, help you focus your research, lead you to the best resources and help you use them.
- Infohawk, the library catalog, allows you to find books and other materials in the University of Iowa libraries.
- Use databases to find journal articles. Different databases cover journals in different fields and might have different perspectives on the same topic. For example, you can find articles on ADHD from psychology journals in PsycInfo and on teaching students with ADHD from education journals in ERIC.Use Resources by Subject to help you choose the best one.
- Use SmartSearch, which searches a variety of research databases at once. It can sometimes be difficult to focus your research in SmartSearch, but it's a great way to find out which databases cover your topic.
- Enhance Searching in Electronic Resources tipsheet.
- Keyword searching, used in most internet search engines, lets you simply type in a word or phrase and find articles (or books or webpages) with that word in it. You are guessing which words the author uses and simple words sometimes have different meanings. The term nesting, for example, can mean the material birds use to make nests or the instinct expectant parents have to prepare their home for a new baby or the extra pieces of metal left over from sheet-metal stamping.
- Subject Headings or Descriptors are used by most databases. Unlike keywords, these terms are assigned to each article in the database and based on the topic or subject of the article. If you use a subject heading for your topic, you get only articles about that topic and not articles that merely mention it. Librarians can help you search databases more effectively and you can use each database's help menu to learn better techniques.
6. Organize and cite your information
Refworks citation management system
RefWorks is a web-based citation management and bibliography tool. It can help you to efficiently store, organize, and share citations and easily format them for papers and bibliographies.
Center for Teaching's Plagiarism Resources
Academic Integrity policies:
Citation and Styleguides
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