Research Journal Page 1

Research Journal Entry #1

After reading through the research models, including the ACRL standards, and viewing the research language presentation reflect on your practice of research to this point in your career as a student.  How do you research?  What strategies do you use that are successful?  What difficulties do you encounter?  Have you engaged in primary research?  Or is it primarily secondary research?  What strategies and methods do you hope to learn this semester?

I feel in a lot of ways that I have had an advantage when it comes to research since throughout my career as a student, ways of doing research have changed dramatically.  While attending college as an undergraduate in the late eighties/early nineties, I did most of my research by searching and reading through actual journals, not to mention microfilm.  It was a hands on experience of browsing through many, many journals and looking at reels and reels of film.  I found the journals that were relevant to the topic that I was pursuing and simply went from there.  The process then took a lot more time, lending itself to more reflection on ideas whether that was the intention or not. I view this as a different kind of thinking that was going on since the only reason to use the computer was to look within the card catalog.  The catalog brought researchers to key words or terms that existed in these resources.  Sometimes I would start out by looking for one particular topic, and seeing the keywords listed on the card in the card catalog would sometimes lead me to other places.  At times they were dead ends, but at other times, quite rewarding since other related topics would pop up, causing me to rethink my ideas and the direction in which I was headed. 

This kind of browsing and thinking enabled more of a wandering and browsing of the mind.  For me this would, at times, create an epiphany that could lead me in a better direction.  Of course at the time, databases were the extent of “online” research (for me anyway), and not all journals were yet available online.  My strategy hasn’t changed much since it is the same then that it is now—read, think, read, think, read, think!  I guess the way that I feel the thinking has changed for me is that utilizing online resources brings researchers very quickly to precise results. Unless a person is motivated to dig deeper, the lack of physical “browsing” will leave those other doors closed, and can also make it less likely that a researcher will happen upon another idea.  Am I making sense?

I am definitely a start in the middle type of person.  I don’t like to box myself in with a precise topic at the start of a research project.  I would rather begin with a more general idea of what I am looking to gain knowledge about, and then as I research, a more specific idea/topic will form and because I have already done some reading and thinking, it is easier more me to decide if my idea is feasible.  While reading through all of the different research models, I immediately can see that as a student, “Defining the information problem” (Big 6 1.1) is always the hardest part of beginning for me.  As Eisenberg states (2011), “It’s not necessary to complete these stages in a linear order, and a given stage doesn’t have to take a lot of time” (p. 2).  I understand and know this to be true, but many times I still will look at as assignment and get stumped before I decide to think about this part later and just dive into the research.   I have to fight the urge to begin at the beginning!

I have done some graduate work in the area of American Literature.  In my courses, I engaged in Primary Research when researching, exploring, and thinking about topics within literature.  In a previous research course that I took, we did not engage in any thinking about how we best do our research.  We simply just did the research.  Most of the course focused on properly citing works, and there was no critical thinking about the research process at all.  I feel that I did a lot more critical thinking about my research questions within my literature classes than I did in the research class itself. 

As a former teacher of English, I don’t know if literature lends itself more easily to original ideas, or if I just view it that way since that is my first love and it is an area that I enjoy exploring.  It is definitely an area that is one of my strengths, since I find it easier to recognize gaps in information about literature than in other areas. That is probably due to the fact that I can read and reread books and never tire of them, since I am able to still find something new in them each time.  I would like to improve my application of primary research in areas other than literature, and I think that this course will help me to accomplish that.

Eisenberg, Mike.  (2011).  What is the Big6?  Retrieved from http://www.big6.com/what-is-the-big6/