Module 3: Writing Research Questions, Using Research Techniques & Creating an Outline.

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You are finally digging into your actual research so it is necessary for you to decide what you will research, how you will do it and then create an initial outline for organizing your final paper.







Writing the Literature Review: Knowing what and why you write a literature review is important. Here is an overview by David Taylor at the University of Maryland. He is actually presenting it in the context of using the lit review as part of a larger document, but it is good description.


Creating Research Questions:
Creating research questions is not necessarily an easy task. Sometimes they will pop into your head but often you have to spend some serious time developing and perfecting the questions. Even when you think that you have perfected your questions, you will sometimes find that as you read more articles and learn more about the topic, your research questions will need some slight modification or wholesale replacement.  That is OK.  It's all part of learning.

• Watch this 12-minute video on Developing Research Questions (by Dr. Z). It will provide you with some background, guidelines and help you develop your own research questions.
• Here is another 3-minute video by Dr. Jill Ostrow about creating good questions.
• The Goldmine find for developing a research question is this interactive website from SUNY Empire State College with a plethora of materials about it.

Now that you have identified your research questions, post them along with your research topic on the Research wiki 2011 under your name on the page.

Using Research Techniques for Finding and Gathering Your Information:
You have decided what you want to research and the questions you want to answer. It's time to find your materials. Google Scholar is a great way to begin your research. It is free, comprehensive and proven to be almost as effective as the dedicated research databases. It even has additional capabilities over and above the dedicated research database in that it provides a great deal of information about how specific articles are viewed/used by other academics in the field.

One problem that some of you may have been running into is that you are referred to articles that cost money to access. Usually you won't have to pay for these articles because you can get them through the UNI Library. 
In this section I have included some videos on using Google Scholar and UNI resources:

1. Using Google Scholar from off-campus: 
2. Searching the UNI databases to find what you want; and 
3. Creating an RSS feed from your searches to bring up-to-date results directly to your iGoogle.

Creating Your Literature Review Outline: 
If you are experiencing writer's block, it is just because you don't know what to write . . . Duh!
Here are some resources for learning how to create the Literature Review Outline that you are expected to create before you begin writing your review.

Here is a video that describes creating your Lit Review Outline.

Last updated by Dr. Z on 5/24/2011