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Conducting Secondary Research

When you conduct secondary research, you are trying to learn what experts have to say about a topic. Whether that expert is a world-famous scientist revising an earlier computer model about the effects of climate change on agriculture in Europe or the head of your human-resources department checking company records to see how the Affordable Care Act changed the way your company hired part-time workers last year, your goal is the same: to acquire the best available information—the most accurate, most unbiased, most comprehensive, and most current.

Sometimes you will do research in a library, particularly if you need specialized handbooks or access to online subscription services that are not freely available on the Internet. Sometimes you will do your research on the web. As a working professional, you might find much of the information you need in your organization’s information center. An information center is an organization’s library, a resource that collects different kinds of information critical to the organization’s operations. Many large organizations have specialists who can answer research questions or who can get articles or other kinds of data for you.

UNDERSTANDING THE RESEARCH MEDIA

Today, most technical information is distributed not only in print but also through digital media accessible on the Internet. You will probably use information published in four major media:

USING TRADITIONAL RESEARCH TOOLS

There is a tremendous amount of information in the different media. The trick is to learn how to find what you want. This section discusses six basic research tools.

Online Catalogs An online catalog is a database of books, microform materials, films, compact discs, phonograph records, tapes, and other materials. In most cases, an online catalog lists and describes the holdings at one particular library or a group of libraries. Your college library has an online catalog of its holdings. To search for an item, consult the instructions, which explain how to limit your search by characteristics such as types of media, date of publication, and language. The instructions also explain how to use punctuation and words such as and, or, and not to focus your search effectively.

Reference Works Reference works include general dictionaries and encyclopedias, biographical dictionaries, almanacs, atlases, and dozens of other research tools. These print and online works are especially useful when you are beginning a research project because they provide an overview of the subject and often list the major works in the field.

How do you know if there is a dictionary of the terms used in a given field? The following reference books—the guides to the guides—list some of the many resources available:

Hacker, D., and Fister, B. Research and documentation online (5th ed.). http://dianahacker.com/resdoc

Kennedy, X. J., Kennedy, D. M., and Muth, M. F. (2014). The Bedford guide for college writers with reader, research manual, and handbook (10th ed.). Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Lester, R. (Ed.). (2008>). The new Walford guide to reference resources (Vol. 1: Science, Technology and Medicine; Vol. 2: Social Sciences). London: Neal-Schuman.

Palmquist, M. The Bedford researcher. http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/bedfordresearcher/links/disciplines-art.asp

To find information on the web, go to the “reference” section of a library website or search engine. There you will find links to excellent collections of reference works online, such as Infomine and ipl2.

Periodical Indexes Periodicals are excellent sources of information because they offer recent, authoritative discussions of specific subjects. The biggest challenge in using periodicals is identifying and locating the dozens of articles relevant to any particular subject that are published each month. Although only half a dozen major journals might concentrate on your field, a useful article could appear in one of hundreds of other publications. A periodical index, which is a list of articles classified according to title, subject, and author, can help you determine which journals you want to locate.

There are periodical indexes in all fields. The following brief list will give you a sense of the diversity of titles:

You can also use a directory search engine. Many directory categories include a subcategory called “journals” or “periodicals” listing online and printed sources.

Once you have created a bibliography of printed articles you want to study, you have to find them. Check your library’s online catalog, which includes all the journals your library receives. If your library does not have an article you want, you can use one of two techniques for securing it:

Newspaper Indexes Many major newspapers around the world are indexed by subject. The three most important indexed U.S. newspapers are the following:

Many newspapers available on the web can be searched electronically, although sometimes there is a charge for archived articles. Keep in mind that the print version and the electronic version of a newspaper can vary greatly. If you wish to quote from an article in a newspaper, the print version is the preferred one.

Abstract Services Abstract services are like indexes but also provide abstracts: brief technical summaries of the articles. In most cases, reading the abstract will enable you to decide whether to seek out the full article. The title of an article alone can often mislead you about its contents.

Some abstract services, such as Chemical Abstracts Service, cover a broad field, but many are specialized rather than general. Fuente Académica, for instance, focuses on Basque studies. Figure 6.1 shows an abstract from AnthroSource, an abstract service covering anthropology journals.

Government Information The U.S. government is the world’s biggest publisher. In researching any field of science, engineering, or business, you are likely to find that a federal agency or department has produced a relevant brochure, report, or book.

Government publications are cataloged and shelved separately from other kinds of materials. They are classified according to the Superintendent of Documents system, not the Library of Congress system. A reference librarian or a government documents specialist at your library can help you use government publications.

You can also access various government sites and databases on the Internet. For example, if your company wishes to respond to a request for proposals (RFP) published by a federal government agency, you will find that RFP on a government site. The major entry point for federal government sites is USA.gov, which links to hundreds of millions of pages of government information and services. It also features tutorials, a topical index, online transactions, and links to state and local government sites.

USING SOCIAL MEDIA AND OTHER INTERACTIVE RESOURCES

Social media and other interactive resources enable people to collaborate, share, link, and generate content in ways that traditional websites offering static content cannot. The result is an Internet that can harness the collective intelligence of people around the globe—and do so quickly. However, the ease and speed with which new content can be posted, as well as the lack of formal review of the content, creates challenges for people who do research on the Internet. Everyone using social-media resources must be extra cautious in evaluating and documenting sources.

This discussion covers three categories of social media and web-based resources used by researchers—discussion boards, wikis, and blogs—as well as two techniques for streamlining the process of using these resources: tagged content and RSS.

Discussion Boards Discussion boards, online discussion forums sponsored by professional organizations, private companies, and others, enable researchers to tap a community’s information. Discussion boards are especially useful for presenting quick, practical advice. However, the advice might or might not be authoritative. Figure 6.1 shows one interchange related to starting a business as a foreign national.

Wikis A wiki is a website that makes it easy for members of a community, company, or organization to create and edit content collaboratively. Often, a wiki contains articles, information about student and professional conferences, reading lists, annotated sets of links, book reviews, and documents used by members of the community. You might have participated in creating and maintaining a wiki in one of your courses or as a member of a community group outside of your college.

Wikis are popular with researchers because they contain information that can change from day to day, on topics in fields such as medicine or business. In addition, because wikis rely on information contributed voluntarily by members of a community, they represent a much broader spectrum of viewpoints than media that publish only information that has been approved by editors. For this reason, however, you should be especially careful when you use wikis; the information they contain might not be trustworthy. It’s a good idea to corroborate any information you find on a wiki by consulting other sources.

An excellent example of how organizations use wikis is provided by the federal government’s Mobile Gov, a set of wikis whose purpose is to make “anytime, anywhere, any-device government services and info” available to other government agencies, businesses, and the general public. These wikis enable all these stakeholders to contribute technical information and advice about how to help government agencies make their services available from mobile devices. A recent post by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the standards agency for the web, explained that the barriers to using websites on a mobile device are similar to the barriers faced by people with disabilities when they try to use websites on any device. The post by W3C included detailed recommendations and links to information that can help developers make the transition to responsive web design. In other words, the wiki provided a forum for experts on web accessibility to help federal agencies provide services.

Moderators who oversee discussion boards routinely delete comments from trolls advertising weight-loss solutions and other scams.

How do you search wikis? You can use any search engine and add the word “wiki” to the search. Or you can use a specialized search engine such as Wiki.com.

Blogs Many technical and scientific organizations, universities, and private companies sponsor blogs that offer useful information for researchers.

Keep in mind that bloggers are not always independent voices. A Hewlett-Packard employee writing on a company-sponsored blog will likely be presenting the company’s viewpoint on the topic. Don’t count on that blogger to offer objective views about products.

Figure 6.3, a screenshot of a portion of NASA’s My Big Fat Planet blog, offers information that is likely to be credible, accurate, and timely.

Tagged Content Tags are descriptive keywords people use to categorize and label content such as blog entries, videos, podcasts, and images they post to the Internet or bookmarks they post to social-bookmarking sites. Tags can be one-word descriptors without spaces or punctuation (such as “sandiegozoo”) or multiword descriptors (such as “San Diego Zoo”). More and more social-media platforms, including Facebook, have adopted the hashtag (#) as a way to tag an item to make it easier to find by searching.

Figure 6.4 shows search results for blogs tagged with “Google Glass” on Technorati, a site that currently tracks more than a hundred million blogs and a quarter billion pieces of tagged social media.

RSS Feeds Repeatedly checking for new content on many different websites can be a time-consuming and haphazard way to research a topic. RSS (short for rich site summary or really simple syndication) technology allows readers to check just one place (such as a software program running on their computer or an email program) for alerts to new content posted on selected websites. Figure 6.5 shows a website that offers RSS feeds. Readers use a special type of software program called an RSS aggregator to be alerted by RSS feeds (notifications of new or changed content from sites of interest to them).

EVALUATING THE INFORMATION

You’ve taken notes, paraphrased, and quoted from your secondary research. Now, with more information than you can possibly use, you try to figure out what it all means. You realize that you still have some questions—that some of the information is incomplete, some contradictory, and some unclear. There is no shortage of information; the challenge is to find information that is accurate, unbiased, comprehensive, appropriately technical, current, and clear.

The most difficult kind of material to evaluate is user-generated content from the Internet—such as information on discussion boards or in blogs—because it rarely undergoes the formal review procedure used for books and professional journals. A general principle for using any information you find on the Internet is to be extremely careful. Because content is unlikely to have been reviewed before being published on a social-media site, use one or more trusted sources to confirm the information you locate. Some instructors do not allow their students to use blogs or wikis, including Wikipedia, for their research. Check with your instructor to learn his or her policies.