Geography: GEO 491 | Research Seminar | England, Fall 2024

Recognize that scholarship is a practice in which ideas form and change over time.

Understand that research is an iterative process, as one looks for gaps in information.

Develop search strategies by formulating keywords and demonstrate flexibility in searching.

Simply a review of the body of published work which record ongoing conversations over time.

Purposes: confirmation of need, establishment of focus, identification of specific subject and context, identification of theoretical base, and identification of methodological base.

Examining the literature almost always leads to some reassessment of the research question.

This process begins with articulating your topic in a few sentences, then breaking it down to main concepts, from which you’ll devise related terms.

Boolean operators allow you to combine terms using AND, OR, or NOT.

OR: Results contain any specified term.
Combine terms using this operator to broaden a search or to allow for variant spellings.

AND: Results contain all specified terms.
Combine terms using this operator to narrow the scope of a search.

NOT: Use this operator to eliminate terms from a search.