Research Resources

In part, this depends on the class and your goals. If you are a PhD student in Microbiology, this will look very different than if you are a freshman taking a Psychology class. For the purposes of this resource here, we'll focus just on ENGL 1190 and what will make a good research question for our class. This is likely applicable to many of your undergraduate classes, though.

A good research question should do the following:

Be answerable. By examining multiple sources and interpreting the information, you should be able to get to an approximation of an answer. In particular, it needs to be answerable through scholarly peer-reviewed research. While I'd love to know if the multiverse theory is true, you won't be able to answer that question with any sort of objective authority at this time.

Be arguable. You will need to take an arguable position for your paper. This doesn't mean "argument" in the sense of trying to convince someone by any means. But your paper will need to make a point even while looking at the complexity of the issue.

Be complex. If the topic could be answered in a simple online or encyclopedia article like "What is depression?" or "What is homeschooling?" it's not complex enough for this paper. The question should be open and explorable. It shouldn't have a simple answer but, instead, should generate more questions and possibilities.

For example, if you were to ask "What is depression?" there will be an answer—a medically defined definition. Then the question is answered and there's no more to discuss. An open question, however, such as "What are the impacts of depression on college students?" is explorable. There may be certain conditions in which it's worse; there may be other factors that put a student at higher risk. It's complex enough that you could continue to dig into more issues that might impact how depression is affecting students. It's not quickly or easily answerable, but there are some answers.

Be reasonable in scope. The topic will need to be broad enough that you'll be able to find research on it and narrow enough that you can discuss it with some level of complexity (see above) in a 5-7 page paper. If you find yourself skimming the surface of the issue, you likely need to narrow down your topic. For example, "what are the impacts of global warming?" will be far too broad to cover in a 5-7 page paper. A question like "how is climate change impacting Great Lakes fish species?" will work better.

Tips on developing a good research question

• Brainstorm several ideas before you commit to any.

• Do a preliminary search in Macomb's databases or Google Scholar to ensure that research has been done on this topic. You may need to tweak the keywords several times to find the right combination.

• Pick a topic you are interested in. You'll be working on this for most of this semester, so pick a question you are actually interested in learning more about.

• Pick a topic that you can be objective about. While you want to care about the topic, if it is something that you feel so strongly about that you will not be able to be objective during your research, either commit to working through your biases this semester or choose another topic. You will need to be able to address this topic with complexity, which will require being open to being wrong about your current ideas about this topic. The research may show that the issue is not as simple as you think.

For your research paper in ENGL 1190, you'll be expected to use a minimum of five scholarly sources. You will likely need more sources than that, unless you find several sources that are very in-depth like academic books or literature reviews (papers on all research to date on a particular topic). These sources can be websites that pass the CRAAP test, scholarly articles, or academic books.

Understanding Scholarly Research

The main evidence and support for your scholarly research topic should be academic and scholarly sources. However, you can use popular or additional primary (non-scholarly) research for background information and context.

For example:

If your scholarly question was "What impact do green/eco-friendly policies have on customer loyalty?" you could use the following non-scholarly sources as background information and to establish context:

• • • You could use a company website, like Starbucks, to establish how they are depicting their eco-friendliness to the public.

    • You could use a blog or article someone wrote about their opinion to show what people are saying about these policies.

Those would count as primary research but don't ultimately answer your question about the impact. So, for that, you need to look at scholarly journal articles and data that show how eco-friendly policies help businesses. For your scholarly research you might wind up with the following research:

• • • A journal article on consumer perceptions of eco-friendly products

    • A journal article on the impact of eco-friendly practices on green image and customer attitudes.

    • A journal article looking at the impact of eco-friendly products on customer loyalty

    • And so on...

So, the scholarship you find on the topic may wind up being broader (not specifically about Starbucks and your original community that this issue impacts), but it will be looking at what research has been done on this topic and what the research suggests about this topic. Whereas, the background information and contextual research may be more opinionated or biased (or coming from the community directly, like Starbuck's webpage). The difference is you shouldn't treat that primary research as factual and as evidence proving anything one way or the other. It's there to help your reader understand what messages are already out there about the topic or what the intention of the company is.

You can use the following resources to do your research:

• The library databases

• Google Scholar

• The internet (these articles must pass the CRAAP test)

You will need at least 5 scholarly sources. (Academic books, scholarly articles, or internet articles that pass the CRAAP test). You can use any number of additional primary sources to give background information and context for your argument.

The library at Macomb Community College subscribes to numerous databases, academic journals, and e-books that you can access.

Here are some good starting places for research:

• Academic databases by subject

• E-Books

• Some broad databases (all-subject areas)

  • ProQuest Central

  • Gale Literary Sources

  • JSTOR

If you need help with your research or using Macomb's library resources, you can contact a librarian by phone, chat or email.

When doing any type of research, it's important to evaluate your sources. We want to make sure we are getting our information from reliable and trustworthy sources and not someone with biases or incomplete knowledge on the topic.

When doing research for classes, it's even more important to ensure that the research is not only trustworthy but coming from an expert on the topic. While someone with a PhD in history might be the perfect person to tell us more about the politics involved in the Revolutionary War, we don't want that person giving us medical advice. Therefore, it's important to evaluate not only the relevance of the information to our topic but the source and purpose of that information. The CRAAP test (developed by a librarian at the University of California) can help figure out if a website can be used for scholarly research. The handout below explains each criteria, and the second page has a "test" that you can give your sources.