My Research Process

- 6 mins read

This is a living how-to article detailing my process for conducting research about a sufficiently broad topic. It’s as much a guide for me as it is for you, the reader. The fact that it is living means that I intend to prune and edit this document as I refine my research process.

Clarify your intentions

Step 1: Define your topic

Develop a topic to be researched. Most times, this topic will already be picked out for you. You may have a burning desire to learn all you can about something, or you may need information to make a matter clear. Here, develop a topic to be researched and try to make that as focused as possible.

A vague topic like “Advantage of Libraries in America” can be clarified to “The Advantages of public libraries in America in the 21st century”. Reducing the scope of your topic here helps with reducing the areas to focus. In turn, this helps with throwing away a lot of superficially but ultimately useless material (for example, an article on the benefits of private libraries).

If your topic is broad enough, you may have multiple questions that you’d like to be answered. These are research questions, and, if I may say, they’re a boatload of fun. List them out clearly. While researching, you’ll probably have even more.

Essentially, in this step, we are aiming for choosing an end-goal.

Step 2: Decide what sort of research you’d like to do (Hard vs Soft)

Hard research is research that involves a lot of facts, i.e data and statistics. For research like this, it’s best to stick to verified sources like articles published by journals and statistics published by National Bureaus. Hard research can be useful when we’re are trying to research an article that makes analytical claims, which are based on interpretations of fact, data or sources.

Conversely, soft research is really about researching for an opinion about something, news outlets and opinion articles are fine here. This is useful when we are trying to research an article that makes normative claims, which are claims of value or evaluation.

It’s possible, and likely, that there’ll be a mix of these two. For example, when we’re using data and statistics to support an opinion.

Applying this to our example, we can see that it’s possible to conduct both hard and soft research for our topic. It’s possible to seek an opinion on the advantages of public libraries in America in the 21st century just as much as it is to seek statistics related to it, like the correlation between areas that have pubilc libraries and the quality of life in those areas.

In this step, we should keep in mind that the sort of research that you want to pursue affects the acceptable sources for information for that research. If you’re looking for an opinion on what to eat this evening, Aunt Sue isn’t gonna be a bad source of information. However, she’s definitely going to be a bad source for information if you’re trying to figure out whether the US spend on defense delivers a good return on income when compared to the defense spending of their adversaries (except if Aunt Sue has privileged information, obviously).

Step 3: Identify keywords

This is really self-explanatory. Basically, identify keywords that are related to your topic. Here, it’s “libraries”, “21st century”, “America”, “public libraries” e.t.c. We can go one step further and find keywords that are related to our questions as well. This will help when using search engines to narrow the information space.

In this step, we should also identify related concepts to our topic.

Step 4: Get some background information

Background information is general information about the topic you’re researching. As it applies to our example, learning about the difference between public and private libraries, how funding works, how ROI is calculated for public services (honestly, I don’t have too much background information here, precisely why this step is important)

Background information helps with dense scholarly language and lingo that’s specific to the topic. That, in turn, makes the step of parsing through the collated information not as daunting.

So, where can we get background information.

  • You can ask people who know anything about the topic.
  • You can do some light reading on articles containing the keywords that we collated in the last step
  • Textbooks, Journal indexes, abstracts of papers containing related concepts.
  • Books (print and e-books)
  • News articles, magazines
  • Literature Review articles, State of Current Research articles, Analytical Review articles

When reading background information:

  • read it carefully, take notes of terms and names that occur often.
  • Take note of what interests you. This will usually lead to an expansion and clarification of the topic. It may become easier to formulate the questions that you want to ask in this step.

Step 5: Refine the topic

Finally, it should be easier to refine the topic. Instead of “The Advantages of …”, we may now have the ability to formulate our topic as specific questions like, “How much, if by any level, do libraries impact the quality of life of the individuals within their spheres of influence?” or “Does the presence of a library have an effect on the literacy levels in a community?”

If your topic is too narrow, it’s fine to pull back a bit.

Gather Information

Step 6: Search Strategies

With all the preliminary preparation out of the way, we should have all the information we need to go at the problem more intelligently. Now, we need to evaluate strategies. Not every search attempt is appropriate for every problem. Perhaps, Aunt Sue really is a better source of information when you’re trying to find out what the general mood was like when you were born, not Google.

Essentially, there are many tools (employing a broad definition of tool here) that give us the ability to locate information. We should use the best tool for the job. Remember that Google is not the only search engine, and that the first page of results aren’t the only results, and that LLMs are lying machines and everything they say should be taken with a grain of salt.

Step 7: Locate information

After deciding where the best source of the information you want lies, go for it. It could be in books, articles, videos, people, diaries, images, websites, grey literature e.t.c. Gather those sources and the information they carry.

Remember to take notes all through all of this.

Evaluate and analyze information

Step 8: Analyze the information you just gathered

There’s a method (CRAAP method) for this and it seems cool. But it’s quite long and I don’t feel like plagiarizing, so I’ll link it here

Identify if the source is a primary source (you’re reading first-hand experience), a secondary source (you’re reading them tell you about someone else’s first hand experience) or a tertiary source (you’re reading about someone who learned about someone who told them about their first hand experience). It should be obvious how this affects the verity of the information you’re using.

Doing this properly requires analytically reading the sources you gathered, so long as they have been deemed relevant.

Write

Step 9: Write!!!

Gotta write!!! Writing is how we properly formulate an argument. It’s a tool for slowing down our thought processes so that we can be methodological in making sure that everything is right.

I won’t give too much advice here, that’s a seperate guide by itself.

Cite your sources

Cite your sources.

My sources

Resources I used while making this article: