Databases for Preliminary Research
There are many different kind of sources, and each one may help you at a different point in your research. Today's challenge calls out databases that have sources that are helpful at the beginning of your research.
When you are just getting started researching a project, it's helpful to have sources written for a popular audience. Some sources, like academic, peer-reviewed articles and some books are written with an expert audience in mind. They assume that the reader already knows quite a lot about a topic and use specialized vocabulary that most people aren’t familiar with. Other sources are written with a popular audience in mind and don’t assume the audience has specialized knowledge or use highly specialized vocabulary. Works created for a popular audience include newspaper and magazine articles, some books, and a ton of videos, blogs, and podcasts.
It also helps when you're just staring out to have sources that provide an overview of a topic. Even if something is written for a popular audience, it may only address a small slice of a topic. Having a small slice, or scope, isn’t necessarily a bad thing, (ultimately, it will be a great thing for the topic you choose to look at), but it’s not the best place to start. It's better to start with a source that intentionally brings together all the major viewpoints and aspects of a topic into one short reading.
Happily, there are databases made up of sources that are both written for a popular audience and written to provide an overview of a topic:
- Gale eBooks - includes overview articles from specialized encyclopedias that cover most subject areas
- CQ Researcher - includes carefully prepared overview reports on current topics
Because these databases contain sources that try to provide a bird's eye view of a topic, when you search them, it's best to use broad search terms.
For example, yesterday's challenge suggested five possible research topics, one of which was "causes of workplace stress among nurses". If we were doing preliminary research on this topic, we might search for an overview of "workplace stress" or of the "nursing profession." Here are examples of broader search terms relating to the other example topics from yesterday:
| Topic |
Search Terms for Preliminary Research |
| causes of workplace stress among nurses |
workplace stress
nursing profession
|
| forest management practices that lower forest fire risk |
forest management
forest fires
|
| political polarization in US in the 19th century |
political polarization
politics in the United States
|
| effects of increasing funding arts & humanities |
arts & humanities funding |
| factors contributing to the rise of inflation |
inflation |