Good research is about function, not format

Colossal expansion of academic material into online territory, both at Portland State and in general, has made research more accessible, but not necessarily easier to navigate. The library reports that as of November 2010, PSU had 62,108 accessible electronic journals and currently has an online subscription for about 80 percent of its journals. The sheer number of articles and databases might intimidate some students.

“Paradoxically, a consequence of the large volume and availability of online resources is that students are overwhelmed and aren’t confident about making choices,” said PSU Reference Librarian Kimberly Pendell. She focuses on areas in social work, psychology and other disciplines, and has observed that students don’t always know how to best use the added resources.

Some shifts in technology make finding source material more difficult. Gretta Siegel, reference librarian for several physical sciences including chemistry and biology, said that “one thing that repeatedly confuses students is moving from an experience where any article they needed was easily available full-text, to an experience where they can’t just click and download.”

Pendell said the biggest challenge for student research is that sometimes students choose broad topics that they need to trim down. “I always remind students that research is an iterative process; you discover and refine as you go,” she said.

Google Scholar, accessible from the PSU library homepage, is one tool that students can use early in their research to refine their focus. Google Scholar searches through scholarly literature, avoiding the potpourri of information a regular Google search produces.

However, ordinary Google searches can serve an academic purpose as well, according to PSU professor Matthew Warren, who teaches the writing course Writing Research Papers. “Wikipedia, Google, etc., are often incredibly useful for initial, basic research—when students are brainstorming topic ideas, gathering potential information and narrowing their choices,” Warren wrote in an email.

Warren, who teaches many of the research concepts from Bruce Ballenger’s The Curious Researcher, said that students are more likely to use online resources incorrectly when they don’t sharpen their research skills or when they rely only on Google searches and Wikipedia.

Evaluating online sources is one of the first topics Warren discusses at the beginning of each term, focusing on Ballenger’s criteria for evaluating web sources. The first factor, he said, is determining whether a source is primary or secondary. The second factor is to determine whether the source is objective or subjective. The third factor is the source’s stability—can the researcher find the same source in the same place from one day to the next?

Online peer-reviewed journals may be seen as the safe solution, but they don’t guarantee great research. Because research is increasingly interdisciplinary, the best research makes connections in context, according to PSU Education Librarian Bob Schroeder.

Schroeder has been at PSU since 2004 and teaches freshman inquiry courses in the University Studies program. He said that when students transition from high school to college, they must change the way they approach research. When students leave high school, they believe they can get to the bottom of complex issues in a five-page paper, and that “being a smart person meant that ‘I will have conclusions and I will know the answer.’”

“Students tend to think of research in cold, clinical, expressionless terms, but this is not, or at least should not, be the case,” Warren said. Many seasoned researchers believe that students should use thorough critical thinking to determine which sources are right for their research.

In reality, students can use social media and various other online sources to bring abstract academic concepts to life. Schroeder gives the example of using a Lady Gaga video to examine broader concepts like “sociological models of women and music.”

Schroeder emphasizes the importance of becoming engaged in research by “occupying” it. “If you as a student don’t occupy your research,” Schroeder said, “then the question I would ask you is, who is?”