Hello! This course guide has been created for students enrolled in COMM 4999 - Research Projects in Communication course. In this guide, you will find several resources intended to help with your research coursework.
Below is a description of the pages found in the top tab menu:
- Research Guides:
- Communication: This is the main guide that has the best resources for Communication research. Remember that your topic could be interdisciplinary and other guides could prove useful to use on the Research Guides page.
- Research Tutorials
- Brainstorm Key Terms for a Search: Learn how to formulate a research question based on a topic, and generate keywords that can be used in the Library's catalog and databases.
- Advanced Search Tips - A few key tools and strategies to create a search focused on your research needs.
- Finding Peer-Reviewed Articles - This page contains a list of databases that contain scholarly and peer-reviewed journal articles, along with a few things to keep in mind when conducting your research.
- Citation Chasing - Citation chasing is a strategy that can be used when conducting a literature review. The process involves taking the sources you've already found to help steer you toward undiscovered sources.
- Use Reference Lists to Find More Sources: Look through reference lists of sources you already have to find additional sources. Plus, use Google Scholar to find sources that cite the sources you've found.
- Using Google Scholar - To get the most out of Google Scholar there are a few things you'll want to set up first. This guide provides instruction on how to set all of that up.
- APA Guide & Citation Resources
- APA Style Guide - An easy-to-use guide on APA citation guidelines, including in-text citations, references, and general formatting standards.
- How to Generate a Citation - Many of our databases provide tools that generate citations for sources found in them. This guide provides an overview of where those tools are usually found (it varies between databases), and a few things to keep in mind when using them.
- Zotero User Guide - Zotero is a free citation management tool that can be used to help organize and keep track of all the citations you collect for the literature review. This guide can help get you started, but please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions.