Research Strategies- Christine Hawryluk

Hi everyone!

I have to say that reading week was not very relaxing as I pent the whole week doing effective research for my topic. In all of the research strategies reviewed in class, I have found that the Boolean operators were the technique that helped me the most.

Boolean logic is used when looking in a database by using the words AND, OR and NOT. This technique is supposed to be helpful when looking for scholarly articles and looking on databases by narrowing down the search of possible search results.

In my research, I was most successful in using books (primarily secondary sources). However, I did decide to search on the York University Library Database, as well as Google Scholar. For both cases, I did find that using the Boolean logic was very helpful and was somewhat successful. On Google Scholar, I did happen to find a few useful and relevant articles to my topic, while through databases on the York University Library website I was not able to find any useful articles.

This is not my first time using Boolean logic and I find each time I use this research strategy, it helps me to narrow down the list of search results, as well as the relevance of the articles that come up in the list. Therefore, I will use this research technique again in the future, since it is a technique that is reliable and useful.