As soon as the requirements for the assignments were posted on Stream, I picked a topic for my position paper and started doing research for it. However, after completing some of the lessons, especially from week 2; I realized that the information I collected so far may not be valuable at all. I only used “Google” up until last week, so I had to go through the material I had in hand to check for veracity. It turned out that I had a lot of tertiary literature and some papers that weren’t actually published scientific papers. It wasn’t all a waste though, I did find some useful information, and as mentioned in lesson 1 from week 1, “tertiary literature gives you a good overview on the topic and it can be a good starting point”.
After learning about
“Google Scholar” and the “Massey Library” I was able to find more reliable data
for my research. To be honest, I did have some difficulties finding the
information I wanted using these tools. I think I wasn’t using very clear terms
for the search, so I went back to the papers I found on Google and noted any
references to the authors that I could find. I then did a search using the
authors’ names and was able to find some publications related to my topic. Also,
from the tertiary literature, I found the names of some scientific journals, so
I went straight to their websites to look for more information.
Another thing I found
to be very useful was looking at the Reference lists on the first papers I had
in hand; it led me to other very good sources of information. There are still a
couple of papers that I cannot verify the authenticity just yet though. One is
a paper that was presented in a conference in 2009, so I am trying to find more
recent data from this presentation or if it was actually published in any
journal after 2009… but I will get there!
The researching
methods presented in the lessons, the importance of distinguishing the different
types of sources when doing a research, and how and where to find these sources
are all very interesting topics. I had never used “Google Scholar” before and
had no idea on how scientific information was published. Very interesting
indeed! I am so glad I started my BSc with this communication paper. I am sure
I will be much more prepared for future research assignments!
“The important
thing is to never stop questioning.”
-Albert Einstein
