Boost your research skills for your Built Environment research project

You will find out about:

• The best piece of advice we could give about choosing your research project.
• Where and how to find inspiration.

Choose a research area that you are enthused about!

This is the best piece of advice when choosing a research topic. You will need to research, read, evaluate and write on this topic. Word counts for dissertations vary but this may be the highest word count assignment you have had so far! 

If you choose a topic that you are not keen on or only have a passing interest in... it will be difficult to sustain the energy needed to read, research and write about this! 

It is important you choose a topic that you are interested in... whether this is:

• self healing concrete.
• dealing with endangered wildlife on construction sites.
• heat pumps.
• low impact housing.

...choose something you are passionate about!

See the bigger picture!

You could head to books, course notes, lecture or seminar content. All good sources! However, what about checking out what is topical with your professional bodies or being discussed in journals and professional publications?

Professional bodies, organisations and websites are incredibly useful sources of information! The information will be tailored to your profession and can indicate key areas of interest, key issues and hot topics.  These publications and websites are rich sources of data!

Take a look around the organisations website today to see what is happening in your industry. Try the news, research, policy or campaign sections as well as the social media channels to find out what is key at this time to your organisation.

Here are a range of professional bodies or organisations.

 Activity 1: Visit one of the professional bodies websites to find out what is important to them.

• Go to the Chartered Institute of Building website.
• Find out what they are putting out on their social media.
• Go to the news section and read relevant reports or research.

​​​​​​​Below you can see an example of what is current with CIOB by looking in the organisations research section.

You may have already run a few searches for information related to your possible research area.

From those search results, choose a couple of resources to read. We recommend you read around before confirming your topic to make sure you are still interested in the area and understand the literature you are working with.

Depending on your search results, you may have found:

• a relevant section of a textbook.
• a specialist book.
• a journal review article.
• an original research paper.

A journal review article is particularly useful at this point as it will give you a snapshot of what is happening in this field of research. 

If after your initial reading... you are still interested in your research area that is a good sign! If you are not, it's a sign to find a new subject!

For the purpose of this guide, we are interested in self healing materials and concrete.

We will use this as an example throughout the guide. Here are a few resources we found when scoping out this topic and deciding if we were interested enough to write a dissertation on it.

Search for dissertations using Library Search.

Type a few keywords related to your topic and then apply a Content Type filter to narrow your results to Dissertations or Theses.

There are two relevant filters.

• Hallam Dissertations or Hallam Theses: these are print or online dissertations or theses by undergraduate, postgraduate or PhD students on Sheffield Hallam courses. Our print dissertation collection is very small and not representative of all courses, departments and levels of study. The collection is there to be used as examples of this type of writing.
• Dissertations / Theses. This will include all available dissertations and thesis- including the ones above from Sheffield Hallam- and dissertations from other universities and high-level theses for doctoral or research degrees.

Always check the degree level of the dissertation or these you are viewing as they can range from undergraduate to PhD doctoral theses.

 Activity 2: Run a search in Library search and find a relevant dissertation.

You can either run the search in Library Search or you can search a dissertation database.

Congratulations you have completed two sections! 

Time to take a break - maybe time to take a drink - how about water or your preferred beverage! Take a look here to find out how beneficial water is for you!