Module 2: Design Your Search Strategy, Learn the Stages of Research (1 page 1) what's this?
| Analyze Your Topic | Learn the Stages of Research | Discover Appropriate Sources |
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It's often helpful to think of the researching process in stages. There’s no set time to spend in each of these stages. You may decide very quickly on specific research questions that relate to a subject that you know well, or you may need to complete quite a bit of preliminary research to understand a topic you want to write about. |
Let’s look at what happens during each of these stages.
Preliminary Research
During preliminary research, you’ll look through encyclopedias, magazine articles, bibliographies,
handbooks, and both generalized and specialized reference works. Your goal is to focus your topic
and to learn more about it. Generally, these sources won’t be appropriate
for citing in your paper, but they will help you have a fuller understanding
of your topic.
General Research
During general research, you’ll look through books, general interest journals and magazines, and Websites.
In this stage, your goal is to deepen your understanding of your topic and develop specific
questions that you can research further. These sources may or may not be appropriate for including in your
paper; you’ll have to decide on the appropriateness of including the source
for your subject, audience, and purpose.
Specialized Research
During specialized research, you’ll examine scholarly articles from appropriate
journals, databases, government documents or special collections, and online
indexes. You may even conduct interviews during this stage. In this stage,
your goal is clear-cut: to assemble a set of appropriate sources suitable
for your writing situation.
Again, the stages of research are quite flexible. You may move back and forth among the stages, or skip stages all together. For example, if you completed preliminary research as part of generating and refining ideas, you may be able to move on to the next stage. Or, you may discover specialized terms as you search through specialized sources that send you back to sources that you used during preliminary research.
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Copyright 2003 by the Academic Center, the University of Houston-Victoria, and
Summer Leibensperger.
Created 2003 by Summer Leibensperger.
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