Video by University of Guelph Libraries. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
A good research question:
Identifying specific aspects of your topic can help you refine your research question. Think about the who, what, when, and where of your topic that interests you. You can focus on details like time, location, community, and issue to narrow down your topic.
Example:
|
Broad Topic (too broad!): Stress among university students. |
|
|---|---|
|
Specific aspects of topic that can help you narrow: |
Examples |
| Time | first year of school, during exams, etc. |
| Location | universities in Canada |
|
Category (or community) |
nursing students first generation students international students |
| Issue |
dealing with stress through wellness practices - yoga, meditation, volunteering, spending time in nature, etc. |
|
Narrower Questions (better!): How can spiritual wellness practices help post-secondary students who are experiencing stress? OR How can meditation practice help post-secondary students reduce stress? |
|
Once you have a narrow research question, think ways to translate the key concepts in your questions into keywords.
You'll need keywords to use in your databases searches to find articles. It's a good idea to brainstorm as many synonyms and related terms as you can. Journal articles often use technical vocabulary, jargon and specific terms that are quite different from language you might use to describe your topic, so brainstorming for different terms is a very useful practice.
For example, your research question might be about university students. Be sure to also search the terms college and post-secondary (as synonyms for university) so that you don't miss anything.
*When searching in library databases, you will use ONLY keywords, and not your whole research question.
If your research question is:
How can nature-based meditation reduce stress in university students?
You database search might look like this:
nature meditation (university OR college) student stress
Check out this video for more tips on brainstorming keywords for searching.
Video by Western University Libraries. Used under Creative Commons Attribution License.
Search different spellings and plural/singular
An asterisk (*) or truncation symbols means I don't care how it ends e.g. behav*
Search phrases
Use quotation marks " " to search for a particular phrase e.g. "mental health"
Proximity searching
Proximity searching lets you search for two words near each other e.g. mindfulness N2 meditat* will look for those words within two words of each other in any order
Using AND/OR
Avoid typing sentences into the search box. Always use AND or OR between different ideas:
On the search results screen, click the Peer-reviewed filter under the Adjust your results menu to limit your results to scholarly articles.
Videos by Erik Christiansen, MRU Library.
Database records are what you will see when you find articles in LibrarySearch. These records provide information about the article: the abstract (or summary), the journal name, author name, and key words. They don't always provide the full text of the actual article.
To access the full article, look for links or PDF icons that will take you to the article.
OR, if you don't see these icons, look under "Access Options" to see links to databases containing the full text of the article.
LibrarySearch has a citation generator that can help you cite the articles you find.
NOTE: these citations are computer-generated and may contain errors. It is your responsibiilty to check the accuracy of these citations. Use the MRU Guide to APA Citation to double check your citations.
