Discover: Research Skills

0:00 hi there and welcome to the university of sydney during your time studying at university you'll be asked to do a lot of research for assignments when we talk about research in this sense we don't mean the sort of thing you do in a lab or out in the world which is what you might call primary research much of the research you'll be doing involves finding articles and sources of information online and in the library which is what we call secondary research because we're often reading the results of somebody else's primary research you're probably used to using google to find information and it's a powerful tool with some valuable stuff but the quality of information that you're expected to use at university is much higher than you're used to think of information as falling into a sort of hierarchy of trustworthiness at the top of this hierarchy is what we call peer-reviewed or scholarly research grey

0:46 literature refers to government reports and papers by consultancies and some think tanks and then comes reputable websites usually with addresses that end in gov or dot edu trade journals published for a particular industry and high quality news outlets like the abc are next before we get to more general websites that you can find online and then way down the bottom of that hierarchy of sites like facebook which famously allow a whole lot of very unreliable information to circulate many of the readings you'll be doing at university will look something like this peer-reviewed journal articles are published in specialist academic journals and report on research undertaken by academics at universities around the world these papers go through a process called peer review where a researcher's work is checked by independent experts in the

1:32 field before being approved for publication this process helps to maintain a high standard of quality in academic publications many of these resources can be accessed from library search on the library's homepage this tool searches through a range of our academic databases which gives you free access to this information but the catch with doing this kind of research is that you need to do some thinking unlike google which has algorithms that do some of the thinking for you the first thing you need to do is identify the key concepts that you're searching for these are some of the key ideas that stand out in an assignment question and in your course readings keywords and concepts are basic things that can be expressed in a way that allows them to stand alone ice cream is an example of a key concept that you can use for a search whereas favorite flavor of ice cream is

2:17 a combination of several key concepts next it's a good idea to think about related terms or synonyms in case databases are describing your key concepts in different ways if we take our ice cream example you might look at frozen lollies pop sticks or calipos the more of these terms you have the more helpful your search will be one way to start identifying these terms is to break your research into three questions what do you already know what do you need to know and what are the key concepts that come from these in this example you can see how these questions help us to think about how ice cream consumption might be influenced by climate change doing this thinking allows you to unpack some of your ideas and might point you towards some existing readings or materials that you've already got we'll also help you see links between

3:03 different concepts and ideas when it comes to writing your assignments next you want to use search operators to connect all of these concepts together the or operator will give you articles that feature either concept this makes your search broader so you use or to connect related concepts like ice cream or paddle pop the and operator will give you articles that include both concepts this makes your search narrower so you would use and to connect different concepts like ice cream and climate change the not operator tells the search engine to exclude certain items that you find unhelpful or irrelevant and quotation marks group words together to make a phrase which is made up of two or more words like climate change

3:48 this narrows your search to articles that feature this exact phrase you can use these operators as well as search filters to gradually narrow your search results from a broad search to something more specific doing this step by step allows you to keep track of which search terms and filters are helpful in narrowing your results down this makes it easier to go back a step if you find you aren't getting any helpful results if you are doing research online using google for example it's important to critically evaluate the quality of information you're finding we call this process applying the crap test and it involves four considerations currency how up to date is the source you're looking at if it's 15 years old it might not be relevant to your research if things have changed significantly in that time try to find the most up-to-date research

4:34 reliability and relevance this involves thinking carefully about the data and research that has gone into the source you're looking at have they provided references how they explain where their information has come from there's a bit of critical thinking involved in this step in order to assess how relevant and useful a source will be for your assignment authority this is one of the easiest quality checks for an article who wrote it and what are their qualifications for writing it it helps if an author has the backing of an institution like a university think tank or a government agency this means a large organization has confidence in the expertise of the author and finally purpose and point of view it's important to consider the audience for a piece of writing the articles you find in academic journals are written for a specialist audience with knowledge of a discipline so people like you whereas news media

5:20 and blogs are written for the general public and it's important to consider bias not just political bias but also disciplinary bias the way a public health researcher understands a research question could be very different to the way an engineer might basically it all boils down to whether or not you're using verified blue tick information the library's databases act as a kind of quality assurance process but you can use the crap test to check the quality of information yourself lastly we have two quick tips for extending your research skills firstly if you find a really good journal article take a note of the name of the journal and browse through it journals publish on a focused area of interest so if you find a good article there will probably be more in that journal and you're at university to be curious about knowledge so that's a great place to start

6:06 secondly make sure you look at references in articles and try to trace connections and relationships between the ideas you find in different papers this will make it much easier to synthesize all these sources together in your own writing remember if you ever need help the best place to start is the library website we have lots of resources and team members who are here to help you good luck with your studies at the university of sydney you