LSAMP Early Arrival Program: Home

The research process is a repeating cycle, both for individuals and for communities. It's very much like the scientific method.

Origin ► Planning & Design ► Data Gathering ► Data Analysis ► Results ► Reporting ►► Origin

• Origin: come up with an idea
• Planning and Designing: figure out a strategy for conducting the research and doing literature reviews
• Data Gathering: locate or collect data or information, including previous research in the form of articles
• Data Analysis: look at your collected data to see what it reveals - may decide you need to do more data gathering
• Results: compiling the data analysis and begin the writing process
• Reporting: writing process is fully underway, remember to cite your sources

Keep in mind as you move through the research process that it's not rigid. Things don't always go smoothly or as expected, and that's fine; sometimes researchers need to go back to previous stages and revise things or search for more data or sources.

Literature Reviews

Here's what's useful about doing a literature review:

• Confirmation of need
• Establishment of focus
• Identification of specific subject and context 
• Identification of theoretical base
• Identification of methodological base

So, how does one conduct a literature review? Basically go find relevant resources; it helps to have a plan for this though.

Search Strategies

Effective search strategies require persistence, adaptability and flexibility. 
The best place to start is articulating search terms for your research.

1. In a sentence or two, articulate your central topic
2. Take your sentences from above and break them down into broad concepts
3. For each concept or topic, identify synonyms or related terms - it helps to work with others on this

After step three, you now have some terms to be your keywords, which can be combined in different ways to pull up search results that are relevant to your research. You might discover additional terms during your searching.

Suggestions for this project

• identify the industry or product
  • eg. pharmaceuticals 
• identify the problem or stage of the processes you want to improve
  • eg. packaging
• identify methods to improve it
  • eg. additive manufacturing  

STEM Resources

Using STEM databases for business research

Frequently there is helpful information in the article itself. Author affiliations are generally at the top. Funding information is generally near the bottom, sometimes in the acknowledgement section.

This can give you an idea of the type and quantity of research a company fund and or conducts themselves.

Some databases actually let you do searches by author affiliations and or funding agency, so be on the lookout for those options in the search or in the limiter/filter after the search.

Business Resources

This is not an exhaustive list of business resources, but will help get you started.

While there are some commonalities between databases, each have unique interfaces and functionalities. Checkout our video series, for business and STEM resources, to see an overview of these different databases.

It's important to cite your sources

Using someone else's idea without giving them credit is considered plagiarism and academic dishonesty.  This can have serious consequences. Fortunately, it's really easy to avoid.  Cite your sources. Cite all of them - not just textual, but any images, graphs, videos, audio recordings, or data you use. One reason college students are taught this is because it's expected in the professional academic publishing world too. So, it's advisable to think critically and pay attention to citations when you are evaluating the research of others.