Essential Research Methodology Notes – Clear, Detailed, and Practical
This document provides a comprehensive yet easy-to-understand overview of key research methodology concepts, ideal for students and researchers. It covers essential topics like:
- Information Literacy: Effective search ...
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Week 1
Information Literacy
"Information literacy is the ability to think critically and make balanced judgments about any i
-Boolean operators (like OR, AND and NOT) help broaden or narrow your search results.
,-Grey literature:
Documents generally not published by commercial publishers or indexed by major databases
governments, organisations, universities, research institutes etc., for example, research repo
-Nesting:
Using parentheses to ensure that Boolean operators are processed in the sequence you wan
AND.
Google Scholar vs Bibliographic databases: pros and cons
References to journal articles do not include the publisher.
,-Volume
Journals are usually published in volumes. Each publication year has one or more volumes. A
issues.
-Issue
Journals are usually published weekly or monthly. The weekly or monthly edition of a journal
One or more issues make up a volume
To recognise the document types in a list, check if the references contain:
City and name of publisher. This will indicate a:
Book
Book chapter: in this case page numbers are given, and the title of both the chapter a
Report: published by the research institute or university.
Dissertation or thesis: published by the university as PhD- or MSc-thesis.
Journal name and pages. These indicate an article. A journal often has volumes, split into
-Call number
Also referred to as shelf number, and in Dutch called signatuur. Alphanumeric code which ide
collection and indicates its location on the shelves. It’s like an address. Call numbers can be f
and are marked on the book's spine label.
To do a literature search, it is important that:
the search is specific enough to avoid getting an overload of information;
the search is broad enough to find sufficient information.
, choosing a database
The Library offers a selection of databases via its website.
You can start at:
WUR Library Search to find articles, books, journals and other types of publications on m
Databases & Collections to access multidisciplinary databases (e.g. Scopus and Web of S
databases (e.g. PubMed and CAB Abstracts). In these databases you can do a simple sea
comprehensive search to find scientific articles;
Google Scholar to find publications you know and get easy access to the full text via the
Research@WUR to find publications, projects, datasets and more research output from W
Research.
You can also open the link to the More recommended databases under More Databases & Co
databases and find recommended ones on your subject.
Wildcards
? Question mark: A wildcard that often replaces zero or one character:
wom?n finds woman and women
analy?e finds analyse and analyze
cat? finds cat, cats and Catz
colo?r finds color and colour
Note: in some databases ?
replaces one character only and not zero characters. When you search
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