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#Tutorial: Conducting Research for Your Report

4 Comments on #Tutorial: Conducting Research for Your Report

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I’m sure you have done many research projects during your time as a student. Starting back in elementary school, you were asked to find outside sources and use them to create a project about your topic. Essentially that is your task for the Genre Analysis Report.

To review what goes into conducting research, watch the Lynda.com video on Conducting Research to Collect Information.

After you watch the video, consider the specific list of sources in the discussion of primary and secondary research, and if you want to leave a comment, describe how you can find or conduct one or more kind of research mentioned in the video.

Screenshot from the Lynda.com course Conduct Research to Collect Information

Note: This video has closed captioning, so it does not need a transcript.


 

4 Comments

Google Scholar is a great tool for finding scholarly articles on any topic. This was shown in the Lynda video, and I cannot recommend it enough for finding secondary sources. This is going to be my primary method of finding secondary sources. As for primary sources, interviewing people in the field and finding examples of the writing genre online are the ways I recommend doing research.

My favorite place to find research is using https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ This site it perfect for finding research on biological, medical, and chemical subjects. Another great source of information (that I would currently use if I was in Blacksburg) is Virginia Tech’s Summon. Although Virginia Tech has digitized and removed most of its books from Newman, I feel that the best way to do research is to find a book’s location via Summon and do the actual research with the hard copy in hand. This may not always be possible but I try to take advantage of the Physical copy whenever I can.

I agree with Tom completely. Google Scholar is such a strong source of credible articles, and I really enjoy the ease of usability. I conducted many independent study research projects in high school and Google Scholar was my best friend. It helped me find sources that closely addressed my research topics, and since you can set a range of allowable years, I was able to find articles and books that were applicable to modern advancements.

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