Method of Research--Research Process

To begin your search, you will need  to conduct a broad search within your topic area.  You will be searching the majority of your academic articles through Galileo, but you can also use Google Scholar for articles not found in the databases.

To conduct a broad search on your topic you will need to use keywords and phrases, such as "art therapy", "Personality disorder", or "Marriage." You will quickly find that the results will be large!  But this is a good starting point to begin noticing and exploring features of your area of interest:

A few things to look at:

• Start noticing the subject terms associated with your search results
• Scan abstracts by clicking Page Options and select Detailed to see abstracts and citations in one view.
• Start using limiters on the left-side menu – date, scholarly/peer-reviewed journals, subject, and others to narrow your topic focus and scan the available research

As your focus begins taking shape, you can learn more about how to use limiters, subject terms and other database searching techniques, under Tips on Searching. Library databases also offer options to create a personal account and save searches or alerts related to your topic area.. 

Many scholarly articles will include a section near the end where the authors discuss avenues for future research. This section will highlight new research questions that the study raised, tangential research questions, or questions that have been around for a long time but have not yet been answered. You’ll want to carefully read the authors’ comments about the topics. You may discover research questions that guide you toward a topic area you would like to research. As you are combing through the literature, you need to make sure that your potential topic is still relevant to the discipline.

• The author of the article must submit it to the journal editor who forwards the article to experts in the field. Because the reviewers specialize in the same scholarly area as the author, they are considered the author’s peers (hence “peer review”).
• These impartial reviewers are charged with carefully evaluating the quality of the submitted manuscript.
• The peer reviewers check the manuscript for accuracy and assess the validity of the research methodology and procedures.
• If appropriate, they suggest revisions. If they find the article lacking in scholarly validity and rigor, they reject it.