TAY 604 - Finding Sources to Inform Your Research

Course Description

Description

This session will introduce a process for searching, accessing, and organising high-quality research sources for a topic.

The session will begin by discussing question frameworks, which is one way of identifying the important concepts in their research question. You will then look at how to create a search strategy for an individual concept incorporating synonyms and operators.

Finally, the session will demonstrate how to execute a search in a relevant multi-disciplinary database, apply filters and other strategies to broaden or narrow a search, and showcase some of the advanced functionality available in the database.

Instructors: James Murphy, Bronte Burnette-Chiang, Kyla Flanagan

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this session, you will be able to:

• Create a focused research question using a question framework
• Create a search string containing synonyms for a given concept
• Identify the best database or information source for your topic
• Utilise operators such as truncation, phrase searching, and Boolean operators
• Understand metrics and other methods to assess the quality of information
• Identify alternate sources such as archival materials, data, GIS, traditional knowledge, and others

Delivery

This session will be held in-person.