Although I did my best to apply the research strategies
reviewed in class, I wasn’t able to find much using these traditional methods
and had to search in more creative ways to uncover appropriate sources. This is
largely because the strategies we were shown are largely used for scholarly
research, and my topic is not particularly scholarly. Still, I understand the
implicit value of these methods, and I intend to use them for research projects
in the future.
That being said, my experience in searching through library
catalogues and Google scholar has been an eye-opening experience. The library
catalogues are a good place to go once you’ve narrowed your topic enough to be
searching for the nitty-gritty specifics. You can select a database based on
the subject your question falls under, and in that sense, you can weed through
the largely irrelevant information from the get-go. Google scholar, however,
seems to me to be best for the early stages of a project when you’re casting a
wide net to see what scholars are saying, in general, about your topic. Google
has access to the whole web, rather than articles published in specific
databases, and can therefore provide a global perspective much more easily. Because
of the differences between these methods of research, I can’t say I prefer one
over the other. In fact, they’re best used in combination – Google scholar is a
good place to start the researching process, and then once you’ve got your
bearings and understand the direction you’re taking with your research, the
library databases can carry you through the rest of your research process. That
being said, given that I tend to focus my topic relatively quickly, I predict
that I’ll be depending primarily on the library catalogues for future projects.
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