Hi everyone, welcome back to my research blog!
These past few weeks have been filled with research, research and more research and finding out so many new things about researching in general. Last week we were asked to use some of the online research tools that the University provides for its students, as well as, a regular outside research tool (i.e. Google/Google Scholar). After making many attempts in the Universities tools I hit a wall and started to grow frustrated with the site and with myself. I have done countless research papers for other classes and could not for the life of me figure out why I was getting no where. This is when I switched over to Goggle Scholar and found results quickly. However Goggle Scholar can be tricky sometimes because you may have a great find but you can’t access the whole book with paying for it. After finding a book I felt could be useful for my paper I searched for it in regular Google and was able to access the whole book without limitations, and found this to be a HUGE success after looking for what seemed like hours! Over this past week I have had the chance to review last weeks searches and to think about them, and I feel that the errors were on my side, I believe I am trying to find information out for a topic that may be a little too direct. And due that reason I feel that I will be reevaluating my topic in the week ahead and maybe looking down a different path for my research paper then I had originally planned. Overall doing the research has been very helpful and informative to see what information is out there regarding topics that are interesting to me and that could be helpful to my future career, and although I grew a frustrated at a point it helped me grow and learn to take a step back, look closer at what I was doing, and make changes where they were needed.
Hello Melissa,
ReplyDeleteI am interesting in knowing what new research strategies or tools that we learned in week's three reading have you applied when searching for your topic so far. For instance, in my situation, I have been making the great mistake of utilizing complete sentences, and even asking questions when searching for my topic. When I do this on Google or Yahoo, I only get responds on personal blogs or people asking the same questions on Ask.com and as you know this is not the type of information that is reliable. Therefore, for this week's assignment I used commands such as OR, AND, and/or NOT to be more effective with my research. In fact, I did saw a difference in the information I found after using this strategies. I found a book that would give me a better insight about the advantages and disadvantages of my topic.
Thank you for sharing your your research experience with the class!
Heidy Carrera