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This page has been written to help you in finding your
place in the scholarly conversation regarding your
qualitative research project and proposal.
Getting Started
Your first research assignment is a exploration of library resources on
communication topics that demonstrate qualitative and
quantitative research. You may have had some difficulties in
locating this type of information, especially in the library
catalog as materials frequently are not labeled with
convenient terms such as "qualitative". The following should
help you in developing more specific search terms and
resource knowledge to facilitate the research process.
'Open up' your terminology
Much of your research will be done using the library's
electronic resources. Computers are extremely literal tools
(they are just tools) and cannot translate your
search term into other useful terminology, so searches are for
character-by-character matches, meaning you have to be
flexible in your thinking and what you request. Not everyone uses the same terminology
for a topic, so you will have to come up with alternate
search terms (synonyms) to explore the full range of available
research.
The synonyms may not be a scholarly term, but may be the term
used by a researcher in their writing. This choice is dependent on
a variety of factors such as desiring 'popular audience' attention for
their publication versus the necessity to speak in a formal
jargon to the more scholarly community.
There are some effective ways we will discuss in class to locate
appropriate scholarly language by using the library
catalog's subject headings and a database's
thesaurus or descriptor features.
Find what's out available
The purpose of much of your research is to see where your
work fits in the scholarly conversation. When you have
identified a topic, explore the scholarly resources
available through the library catalog and research databases
to see what has been published. You may have a completely
new view, an emergent interpretation, or one that has been
discredited, you need to know!
Searching Tips
- Note down where you searched, the terms used, and how they were used to
prevent duplicating unsuccessful strategies in the
same resource time and time again.
- Use synonyms (e.g.,
'exotic dancers' are informally referred to as
strippers)
- Use Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to develop
search strategies.
- Be flexible about your searches, review the
descriptors or subjects used in the articles you find.
- The bibliography is not at the end of the article to
take up space, it provides a 'bread crumb' trail to
earlier documents that are also part of the scholarly
conversation.
- Scholars will enter intellectual debates by means of
book reviews, rebuttals and letters to the editors as well
as articles and monographs.
In the Library catalog
- Terminology that may retrieve the qualitative and
quantitative studies you need is to add the term "study"
or "studies" to your search strategy. "Interview" will
retrieve materials that are more likely to focus on individuals rather than
groups.
- A search in the CSUSM catalog can easily be extended
to the San Diego Circuit collection by a click on
 .
In a database
- Use the database's thesaurus to find what scholarly
term(s) might be used for your topic.
- Be sure to review the the scholarly search tools that
the database provides for limiting or expanding your search.
These are tools such as truncation (normally an * at the end of
a word stem or maybe a wildcard character like wom!n.) Each
database varies slightly in which symbols are used and
whether the search engine supports them, so...
- Read the HELP screens.
On the web
- All the tips above will apply, dependent on the
search engine you choose.
- You will find 'grey literature' which may be
publication pre-prints, conference proceedings, grant
reports, etc. that you will not find in the more formal
resources.
- Work published on the web can be scholarly, but you must
be careful to validate the information found through other
readings.
Journal Articles
Journals include the latest research in the field. To
find articles, you need to start with a research
database. Each will allow you to search
hundreds or even thousands of journals at once. The trick is
to get started in the right database to retrieve appropriate
information. Listed here are some of the more useful for
communication research, but these are not all the options as database choice is dependent on your topic.
There can be other useful databases for your topic, these are
just some places to start. For example: If you are thinking of studying
low-rider culture, you may want to include searching Chicano
Database or HAPI since they are more focused on Hispanic
and Latin American cultures than the databases listed below.
Academic
Search Premier
Full-text. A large, multi-disciplinary database
offering full text for nearly 1,850 scholarly journals,
including more than 1,250 peer-reviewed titles.
Communication & Mass Media Complete
Provides abstracts and
full text for more than 200 communication journals.
ERIC
A national
database of education literature, including reports and journal
articles.
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA)
Provides
abstracts of articles from about 2,000 journals (published
worldwide), coverage of recent books, book review citations and
dissertation listings.
PsycINFO
A comprehensive
international database of psychology, covering the academic,
research, and practice literature in psychology from over 45
countries in more than 30 languages.
ScienceDirect
Provides full text access to over 1,000 journals covering
all fields of science. (And not just hard science, but
social sciences.)
Social Science Citation Index (CD for use in Library)
Author, keyword, and citation searching in social science
journals. This is helpful for tracking comments and use of
articles your authors have published.
Sociological Abstracts
Provides access to the latest international findings in
theoretical and applied sociology, social science, and
policy science.
No full text?
Use
 to locate full text if the database doesn't provide it.
If we don't own the full text, place a request using Interlibrary
Loan (it can take 5-10 days, so plan ahead.)
If you have a citation (for example, from a bibliographic
citation) and want to determine if CSUSM has the full-text
journal in one of our databases, you can check our holdings
through the Library Catalog. Type the JOURNAL title (not
article title) in the catalog. If the journal is available
in full text, links are provided to the appropriate database
or if in print, a link to the record provides call number
and holdings information.
Finding Your Place
in the Conversation
No one works in a vacuum and
there should be evidence of the scholarly conversations
surrounding your topic. BUT
the topic might be such new ground, there might be little
material out there. How do you determine where your research
and proposal fit into the professional conversation? It is
up to you as a researcher verify this lack or wealth of
information with a thorough search. A literature review
should be part of this and if you have been through the
library's resources (catalog and journals), you are almost there. This is when the
Internet can come in extremely handy, but be very careful as
not all information is the same quality. In any resource
search:
- Use the authors who you have found to be writing on
your topic as starting points. Look for article rebuttals,
retractions or
responses,
newer texts, dissertations, and reviews of books (reviews
are available through many of the databases).
- Check the website for the journal that published your
key articles--there may be a online commentary area.
- Search the web, but a limited portion, by doing an
advanced search and limiting the domain to .edu to capture
conference papers, bibliographies, and personal websites
from the authors.
- Look for newsgroups and listservs that could be
applicable. There are actually a large number of scholarly
conversations going on in spite of the junk on the web.
Check association sites (usually end with .org) for
like-minded scholars doing studies and conference
announcements.
Other Places to Look...dissertations and the Library's CD-ROM
Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI).
Dissertations searching (remember they have
extensive literature reviews and bibliographies!)
- Digital Dissertations--This
offers the latest two years of
dissertations submitted to UMI (THE dissertation publisher)
and you only get a 24 page preview, but
the preview generally includes some, if not all, of the
literature review. You must log in each time, but as a
student at an educational institution, you have free access.
If you want to borrow the entire dissertation, you need to order
through CSUSM's Interlibrary Loan. You can also order an
unbound copy for your very own for $36.00 from UMI with approximately 7 day
delivery.
- Ohio State's ETD site--this is a consortium of Ohio
universities (OhioLink) which loads either abstracts or full
text of dissertations completed through their system. The
default search is for full-text only, but de-select that to
expand the results. Since this covers a wider date range
than UMI's DD, note the author's names to search in the
journal literature for work since their dissertation.
- Other dissertation sources are listed in the CSUSM
library website on
Dissertations and Theses (found under MORE on the
library home page.)
Social Sciences Citation Index--a CD-ROM available
through the CD Menu on the Research Area computers. This is
a bit clunky to operate, don't be afraid to ask for help.
You can search by author (watch the formatting conventions!)
or keyword. The important feature of this resource is the
link to related and cited authors as you see the connections
between the article/author you have found and the others in
the field.
What you do find should fit into the professional
conversation on the topic. If you don't find anything, you
may have broken new ground yourself, and have a wide open
field for beginning a new conversation through your
research.
Citing Your Sources
As you write your paper, you'll need to cite passages and
ideas from the sources you've found. In order to cite
your resources properly, you need to follow the style
guide used by for this class, the APA
Publication Manual.
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APA: Publication
manual of the American Psychological Association.
5th ed. Washington, DC : American Psychological
Association, 2001.
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