The Research Process

STEP 1

Write out a short thesis statement which clearly describes for yourself the information or question you want to research. This statement may change as you progress through your research, so don’t worry about making it a definitive statement. Really it should serve as a guideline.

STEP 2

Beginning with a general or specialized encyclopedia or other reference work, do some background reading on the topic. This may help you better define your research question and provide you with additional information about the topic such as the names of people, dates of events, places, additional concepts, etc.

Check out the Encyclopedia Britannica Online.

STEP 3

Using some of this information, go to Quest and conduct some simple keyword searches to try and identify books in the library on your topic. Once you have identified some books, you could then move on to more sophisticated search techniques like searching under subject headings to identify more items in the collection on your topic.

Link to Quest.

STEP 4

To start looking for articles on your topic, you might first begin with one of the more generalized indexes such as Periodical Abstracts, PAIS, or Readers’ Guide. Once you have identified some articles of interest using these resources, you will then need to go back to Quest and search for the title of the newspaper, magazine, or journal which contains the article you want to read. Remember that Quest does not contain any information about the articles within a publication, only information about the serial publication itself.

Many of these periodical indexes are in electronic form and available through the web to Trinity networked computers.  You may wish to browse this list.

STEP 5

You should also identify some of the more specialized indexes which could contain information on your topic and search within them. Then, once again, you will go to Quest to see if the library subscribes to the serial which has the articles you want.

To identify these more specialized resources consult with a librarian and also look at the Coates Library web page.

STEP 6

As you are working through these stages, and reading the encyclopedias, books, and articles you find, you will probably start to gather even more information about your topic. You might become aware of additional people’s names, specific situations, places, etc. which you might want to research. When examining the bibliographies of the works you have already read, you might identify additional works you may want to examine. In all of these cases, you would then need to identify the appropriate place to go to find that information. If you have new concepts to research, you might begin with an encyclopedia, and then move on to Quest and indexes. If you have identified new books, search Quest. If you have references to additional journal articles, you would also search Quest, etc.

For some additional sites which discuss the research process use the links below:

The University of California at Santa Cruz McHenry Library's Doing Library Research

The Internet Public Library's A+ Research and Writing guide