Researching a topic for education.

Before you begin researching, you may want to make sure you are confident that you know how to search for information.

If you prefer a downloadable guide, take a look at the Hallam Library guide to ProQuest Central.

The document covers many of the search approaches covered in How to Search.

It is essential to use high quality, up to date literature and evidence in your academic work. 

Recent research tends to be published as articles in academic journals. These articles usually cannot be found by popular search engines, but are indexed in specialist databases. 

Academic databases gather together the contents of academic journals and allow you to find published articles about a particular topic. Searching a range of academic databases allows you to be more targeted in your search and find more of the relevant literature compared to only searching in Library Search.

To search the literature in a comprehensive and structured way, you should use the databases that are relevant to your subject.

You can find the Education and Autism related databases on the Education and Autism subject guide linked below.

It is important to scan key journals in your subject area to keep up to date. The Articles in Press feature displays the most current articles before they have been officially given a volume and issue number. When you have selected a journal, Articles in Press appears on the left, just below the journal cover image.

When you search BrowZine using the search box, your search terms are matched against the words in the journal title.

If you are looking for more neurodivergent conditions in addition to autism, we recommend you use the search box rather than only using the journals within the Autism section.

Why should I keep a record of my search?

• You may want to revisit a useful search and this will be difficult if you can't remember which keywords, filters, and databases you used. 
• Recording your searches also helps you develop your search strategy, so you can keep track of which keywords, filters, and databases have been useful in finding an appropriate number of relevant resources and which haven't. Having a record means you won't end up repeating the same unsuccessful search each time.
• If you ask a librarian for support with your literature searching, they will be able to advise you more quickly and effectively if you can easily show them what you've tried so far.

Search record table

A simple and effective way to keep a record of your search strategy is to create a table where you can include key information about each of the searches you run. Here is an example of how your table might look:

Citation searching allows you to follow the research trail forward and backwards in time! 

Even if you find just a few research papers at the beginning, there are very easy ways of using those first papers to find many more! 

Imagine you have identified an incredible relevant journal article or a set of influential papers that have moved on the understanding within the field. You may now want to understand how the field has developed since that paper was published by looking at the more recent articles that reference it.

You can follow the research trail backwards:

• Most academic research comes with a reference list at the end. This means you can use the reference list to find related articles on the same topic as your original paper.
• This is perfectly acceptable to do and one of the reasons why referencing exists. However, anything you find this way will be older than your original paper. 
• The reference list at the end of the paper shows you which papers and which researchers the author had read and cited.

You can follow the research trail forwards:

• Find out who has cited the article since it was published. 
• Some databases have a citation sort which means when you look up an article in that database, there will be a number (and often a link to the papers) showing how many articles have cited your original article.
• Your original article had to be published before anyone else could reference it, this means that any articles that reference it must be more recent.

In doing this, you can use the articles you've already found to locate both older and newer material with very little effort. 

Important thing to note!

If the article of interest is not include within Web of Science or Scopus... there will be no citation data for the article in those resources. An alternative approach, would be to look up the article in Google Scholar to see if there is any citation data in the listing of the article in Google Scholar.

What is a metric?

A metric is a value placed on something. The term something is quite broad but it needs to be! In academic research, a metric could be:

• how many times an article has been cited.
• the impact factor that a journal has.
• the h-index attached to an individual author.

A metric can be used to evaluate and assess but it should always be done in conjunction with other information as a number is just a number! With great power comes great responsibility... use metrics responsibly! 

You can find out more about the responsible use of metrics in the article and guide below.

As well as books and articles, you may need to find other types of literature to help with your discussion or argument. These resources are commonly referred to as 'grey literature'.

The term 'grey literature' refers to resources which are not from an academic publication or a commercial source, such as policy documents, government reports, internal guidance, etc.

Unlike academic journals in databases, grey literature is not generally brought together in one consistent place. However, there are lots of sources of grey literature that you can use:

• Databases such as Web of Science, SCOPUS and ProQuest can be good starting points for grey literature.
• If you are aware of a relevant organisation in the field, such as a professional body or a government department, looking on the website of that organisation can be a useful part of your search for grey literature.
• You can also use Google when you are looking for sources other than academic articles and books. However, information from Google searches is not necessarily regulated, so it is particularly important to evaluate these sources effectively.

If you need to access a resource that the library doesn't already have in its collection, then you can use our Document Supply Service. You can use the library's Document Supply Service to request journal articles, books, book chapters, or other resources not available at Sheffield Hallam. The Document Supply Service will then apply to borrow these resources from other libraries, both from within the UK and from around the world. 

More information about how to use this service can be found at the following link: Document Supply Service

Congratulations you have completed another section! 

Time to take a break - maybe try some mindfulness!