The research strategies to find government policy information build on the concepts you may have learned in your writing program, but each writing program has unique research requirements, and sometimes students complete these requirements at different stages of their college journey. This page reintroduces these concepts to ensure that everyone has this research skills foundation.
Research is a process...
Diagram that shows the general flow of the research process.
How to Choose
Within the guidelines of the assignment, choose a topic that interests you. This makes it much easier to do the research and writing required for your work. Get inspiration from course readings or areas you want to learn about.
Keep the scope of your topic manageable. You don't want a topic that is so broad your sources don't relate to each other, but you also don't want a topic that is so narrow you can't find many or any sources at all.Use questions like who, what, when, where and why to narrow and broaden your topic
Developing a Topic
Spend some time exploring ideas or concepts about your topic. Write down two or three subtopics that are related to your main topic. Continue brainstorming by jotting down related terms, and keywords. This exploration can be used to determine the scope of your research, formulate a research question, narrow or broaden your topic and identify keywords.
Infographic that explains Boolean Operators and gives examples of their uses.
Truncation is a search technique that broadens your search to include various word endings. To truncate your search terms, replace the word ending with an asterisk *.
Limits provide database-specific recommendations for narrowing a search. Applying limits will filter out results that don’t meet your search requirements. This will save you time because you won’t need to look through pages of search results that don’t include the information that you need Each database offers different limits. Be sure to check them out to see how they can help you with your search.
For example: In the database, Historical Abstracts, you can filter your search results for peer review, publication date, document type, language, subject, etc.
The image below illustrates how applying limits will help you to narrow
your search results.
It's important to know that databases use subject headings to organize their articles. When you know the right subject headings for your topic, you can search more efficiently. Starting out on a new topic, you won't know the subject terminology. A simple way to find them is to start with a keyword search. When you find an article title that meets your needs, look for the subject headings assigned to that article. In most cases, those subject headings are hyperlinked and will take you to a list of articles with the same subject heading.
Scholarly articles often have extensive bibliographies, also called reference lists or works cited pages. Bibliographies include references to articles, books, and other relevant literature that were published before the article. Some databases provide links to the cited references so that you can look at those articles as well, which might provide more articles for you to use in your paper.
Cited References can help you find articles that are older than the one you are reading.
An Example:
Look at the example to the left. If you found a relevant article from 2003, you could look at the articles in the bibliography to see where your article got the information used to support their main points. These older articles can also be useful to your research, especially if you need to write a literature review.
You can use a similar method to find newer articles, by looking at the articles who have cited your 2003 article in their bibliographies. To find out more about this method, see the tab for Times Cited references.
Some databases, like Web of Science, include times cited references. Think of these as the opposite of a bibliography. Where bibliographies include references that are older than the article, times cited references are newer than the article.
Times Cited references can help you find articles that are more recent than the one you are reading.
An Example:
Look at the example to the left. Let’s say your professor doesn’t let you include references in your paper that are older than 2005. You are finding articles about your topic, but they are all too old. Even the best article about your topic was published in 2003.
Using times cited references, you could see which articles have cited the 2003 article. Chances are you will find one published a more recently that you could use for your paper.
When you find an article that you think will be a good to use, you can take advantage of “related articles” to find similar articles. Databases have different formulas for determining how an article is “related,” but it usually is a combination of same keywords and descriptors.
You can usually find a list of related articles on the results screen of the database.
| Use a database and its limits/filters | Google the source/publication title | Check a directory |
|---|---|---|
| Most databases have a “peer- reviewed” or “refereed” limiter that you can check while searching | Check the journal’s description in “journal information” or “about this journal” to see if it is peer-reviewed/refereed | The Ulrich’s Periodical Directory database lists journals and this icon  tells you if it is peer-reviewed/refereed |
Diagram that explains Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources, as well as how they relate to Publishing and Research.
Research papers will often require you to use a variety of different types of sources. Once you have found sources on your topic, it's important to understand the types of information a sources provides to you. Each of your sources must help you address/answer your research question in some way. A general way to categorize these types of information is by considering if a source provides data you can analyze, arguments you can engage with, or background information to contextualize your topic.
For in-depth searches, try databases. Use databases to search for articles, books, newspapers, and more on a particular topic. Choose broad subject areas (e.g., history, art, political science) and interdisciplinary databases, or ones that search across multiple disciplines. The Library has access to hundreds of databases -- organized by broad subject areas.
The full text of an article within a database is provided in multiple formats. Look for:
The Get it at UC link will provide you options for how to access the full text of the article. If there are no online links available, this means you need to request the item through Interlibrary Loan if a print version is not available at UC San Diego. The Library will deliver the full text of an article to you free of charge. When requesting you will need your Library ID number.
Your library card/account number begins with "21822" and can be found on the back of your UCSD ID card or within the UCSD app. Enter the 14-digit number without spaces.
Set up Google Scholar for full-text access.
