WR 121 Chelf: Welcome

This guide is designed to help students who are doing a project or assignment that involves writing and research.

Use the tabs to navigate through the other pages of the guide:

• Find Articles - Recommended databases for finding published articles and other published writing.
• Find Statistics and Websites - Starting points for U.S. government and global resources.
• Peer Review - Peer review explained.
• Evaluate Sources - How to determine whether the sources you've found really meet your needs. 
• Research Exercises - Research exercises to support this class.
• Cite Sources - Help with MLA citations and manuscript formatting.
• Get Help - Get help from a librarian 24x7, get support from a tutor, or find a handout or tutorial to help you with your research.

Research is generally an iterative process. That is, we have to make several passes at it before things start to fall into place. All the same, it can sometimes be helpful to imagine it as a linear process. Here's one approach to that.

Step One: Get Ready!

First, get to know your topic.

In order to explore what others have written and understand about your topic, start by searching a broad concept related to your topic.

For example, if you're writing about the experience of returning home from a military tour of duty, search "military life" or "military reintegration." If you're writing about juggling college, work and home-life, search on the phrase "time management" if that resonates with your interests. The trick is to search on concepts or ideas that describe the life experience you're writing about.

Background sources like encyclopedias, news articles, and summary reports are good for finding out who is talking about your topic (psychologists? educators?) and an overview of what they think is important.

Some places to get to know your topic include Encyclopedias for Background Research, Wikipedia, the "Topic Search" in Academic Onefile, searching Credo Reference, or looking for a report in CQ Researcher.

As you read the article or report, look for new terms that describe your topic and make note of them as potential search terms.

Step Two: Search Terms and Articles

For this class, you will be incorporating outside sources in your writing. Looking for sources involves doing research, but you can think of it more as exploring what others have written or considered important. The idea is to expand the conversation beyond your personal narrative to include other people's thoughts and perspectives in ways that add to and support your own ideas.

To do this effectively means developing a strategy rather than just plugging words into a box randomly. 

The Find Articles tab will help you put together some strategies for selecting places to search that make the most sense for your goals and constructing searches that will make sense.

Here are a few ways to think about developing lists of words to plug into databases.

• Brainstorming Keywords

  from Portland State University Library
• Developing a Search Query

  from Portland State University Library
• Research 101: Building Keywords

  from Northwestern University Libraries
• Selecting Keywords

  from Coastal Carolina University Kimbel Library

Step Three: Summarize and Cite

The last step here is bringing it all together. Summarize the research you found and cite the sources in a methodical fashion, in this case using MLA citation format. Most of this information lives on the Cite Sources tab, although you'll want to put some thought into how you construct your annotations according to your instructor's requirements.