Communication Research Methods

For your assignment, you need to find:

1. 8 items, minimum 4/maximum 6 peer-reviewed articles…
2. 2 to 4 items must be books or book chapters…
3. At least 5 should have been published since 2013 or after
4. Sources must be from communication/media/cultural studies or cognate disciplines…

A) First Steps

• Do some preliminary research to see if your topic is covered in the research literature already
  • More recent topics may not have much scholarly research conducted on them
  • The narrower you start, the less you will find
  • Preliminary research helps to surface themes in the research literature
• Build out your searches around concepts, for example:
  • Example topic: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Canadian national identity
    • Concept 1: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation OR CBC
    • Concept 2: national identity
  • Conduct preliminary searching to identify additional concepts, which you can construct searches around:
    • "Canadian Broadcasting Corporation" OR CBC
      AND nation*
      AND character OR identity OR culture

• Start at the Communication Studies Subject Guide
• Start with Communication Studies @EBSCOhost database bundle
• make sure you select the Scholarly or Peer-reviewed check box on the search page of the database to limit to scholarly articles
• Don't limit yourself to only 1 database; if results are not what you are needing, try another e.g. ProQuest
• Learn about different resource types:
  • Popular magazines vs scholarly journals
  • How Can I Tell if my Source is Scholarly? (video: 4:21)

Tips:

• Break your research question down into specific concepts and subject terms; don't enter a question directly into a database
  • E.g., don't search for "Fake news" and the culture of politics on social media
  • Instead, look for specific terms and link them together, e.g. "fake news" AND politic* AND "social media"
  • Use " " to search an exact phrase
  • Use a * at the end of a word to search for all letter combinations (wildcard)
  • The “AND” operator indicates the term must be included in our search
  • Scan the abstracts for related subject headings (e.g. Fake News = False News in EBSCO)
  • Add related terms using “OR” e.g. "Fake news" OR "False news" - searches for both phrases

To find articles published after 2013 (or any particular date)

• Look for the Limit area on the database's search page to limit to a particular month/year; often you can do this in the results listing as well
• keep track of where you look and the keywords you use
• start early. (library staff can deliver items from other libraries)

Additional Tips on Results:

• Change the default sort of results from "Newest" to "Relevance"
• Don't limit results only to "Full Text" in EBSCO; you'll miss a large set of full-text articles that can be accessed

Use Omni to identify books:

• Use the Omni advanced search

Run your search and limit results to either Books & eBooks and/or Book Chapters in the Resource Type facet at left side of the results page

• Like searching for articles (above), break your search up into specific concepts, e.g. Media AND Convergence AND Television
• When using operators to connect terms remember Omni is case sensitive; type AND instead of and; other databases are not case sensitive
• In your results list, click the book title to find additional subject terms for books to add to your search

Additional book search tips (for print when applicable)

• Learn about call numbers
• Floor plans for locating books; shows call # ranges by floor (in the Waterloo campus library)
• Requesting books from other libraries (note videos)

• You can add/remove databases to search depending on the discipline you are interested in
• In EBSCO, on the main search page, click the "Choose Databases" option and select additional databases that are appropriate, e.g. Anthropology plus (ProQuest also has a similar feature)
• You may also need to search in other discipline specific databases, found on the Databases page, listed by discipline

How do I keep out sources from adolescent or behavioural psychology or medicine or psychiatry?

• You can remove databases by following the step above, and then deselecting those that are not appropriate, e.g. Psychology databases such as PsycInfo
• You may have to check the results carefully to see they are not coming from a journal outside the areas of interest, e.g. look at the bibliographic information in the results list

The good:

• The biggest database in the world!
• Convenient, easy
• Good if you need to find a source quickly and you have a citation
• Good if using the “cited by” feature

The not so good:

• NOT only scholarly materials: Course syllabi, Academic blog articles, Discussion papers, "White papers," "think tank" papers – not all peer-reviewed - AND Predatory Journal content
• No way to get only peer-reviewed; typing "peer-reviewed" in search box won’t work
• Weird and wonky: you can’t really refine the results properly
• "Commercial" results?
• PREDATORY journal articles
• If you use Google scholar: if off-campus, follow the setup instructions here