6.3 Developing a Research Strategy

In the previous section we discussed what research was and the difference between primary and secondary research. In this section, we are going to explore how to develop a research strategy. Think of a research strategy as your personal map. The end destination is the actual speech, and along the way, there are various steps you need to complete to reach your destination: the speech. From the day you receive your speech assignment, the more clearly you map out the steps you need to take leading up to the date when you will give the speech, the easier your speech development process will be. In the rest of this section, we are going to discuss time management, determining your research needs, finding your sources, and evaluating your sources.

Allotting Time

First and foremost, when starting a new project, no matter how big or small, it is important to seriously consider how much time that project is going to take. In most public speaking courses, you may have two or three weeks between speeches in a semester course or one to two weeks in a quarter course. But from the moment your instructor gives you the assigned speech, the proverbial clock is ticking, and with each passing day, you are losing precious time in your speech preparation process. As a college student, you probably have many things vying for your time in life: school, family, jobs, friends, etc. That’s why it’s important to really think through how much time it’s going to take you to complete your preparation in terms of both research and speech preparation as well as begin your assignment the day you receive it.

Research Time

Researching your speech will take approximately a third of your preparation time whether you are conducting primary research or relying on secondary sources. To complicate matters, research is never just a one-and-done process. As you develop your speech, you will realize that you want to address a question or issue that didn’t occur to you during your first round of research, or that you’re missing a key piece of information to support one of your points. Therefore, always allow extra time in your schedule for targeted research. Also take into account the time necessary to meet with a research librarian (which you should definitely do). Set up an appointment with a research librarian well ahead of the time that you think you will have your questions organized or be ready to discuss your topic. Remember that librarians have schedules as well, and you are less likely to get an appointment if you wait until the last minute to put in your request.

Determining Your Needs

Once you have a general idea of your assignment and topic, you can start to ask yourself a series of simple questions:

• What do I know about my topic?
• Do I have any clear gaps in my knowledge of my topic?
• Do I need to conduct primary research for my speech?
• What type of secondary research do I need?
• Do I need research related to facts, theories, or applications?

The clearer you are about the type of research you need at the onset of the research process, the easier it will be to locate specific information.

Start with Background Information

It’s not unusual for students to try to jump right into the meat of a topic, only to find out that there is a lot of technical language they just don’t understand. For this reason, you may want to start your research with popular sources written for the general public. Generally, these lower-level sources are great for background information on a topic and are helpful when trying to learn the basic vocabulary of a subject area. You will learn more about popular sources in the “Finding Reliable Sources of Information” segment.

Finding Reliable Sources of Information

Once you have a general idea about the basic needs you have for your research, it’s time to start tracking down your secondary sources. Thankfully, we live in a world that is swimming with information. Back in the decades when the authors of this textbook first started researching, we all had to go to a library and search through a physical card catalog to find books. If you wanted to research a topic in magazine or journal articles, you had to look up key terms in a giant book, printed annually, known as an index of periodicals. Researchers could literally spend hours in the library and find just one or two sources that were applicable to their topic.

Today information is quite literally at our fingertips. In fact, we have the opposite problem from a couple of decades ago—we have too much information at our fingertips. As a result, we now must be more skeptical about our sources of information.

In this section we’ll discuss how to find reliable information in both popular and scholarly (or peer-reviewed) sources.

Popular Information Sources

Popular (or non-academic) information sources are written so that they can be understood by the general public. Most popular sources are written at a sixth- to eighth-grade reading level, so that they can be read by someone without a high school diploma. However, the information contained in these sources is often quite limited because it must be conveyed in such simple terms for its target audience.

Books

A book is a full-length manuscript consisting of chapters. Books can be written by single or multiple authors, as well as be edited collections of essays by different authors. They are available as either hard or digital copy, and some libraries have both types in their collections.

If you use your library’s databases to find a book, you have access to the books of other libraries as well via interlibrary loan.  An interlibrary loan is a process where librarians are able to search other libraries to locate the book a researcher is trying to find. If another library has that book, then the library asks to borrow it for a short period of time. Depending on how easy a book is to find, your library could receive it in a couple of days or a couple of weeks. Keep in mind that interlibrary loans take time, so do not expect to get a book at the last minute. The more lead time you provide a librarian to find a book you are looking for, the greater the likelihood that the book will be sent through the mail to your library on time.

Furthermore, in today’s world, we have one of the greatest online card catalogs ever created—and it wasn’t created for libraries at all! Retail bookseller sites like Amazon.com can be a great source for finding books that may be applicable to your topic, and the best part is, you don’t actually need to purchase the book because your library may actually own a copy of a book or be able to request it for you via interlibrary loan. If you find a book that you think may be appropriate, plug that book’s title into your school’s electronic library catalog. If your library owns the book, you can go to the library and pick it up today.

Finally, some books are partially or entirely available for free via the world wide web as digitized content via on-line libraries. Some online libraries we recommend are Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org), Google Books (http://books.google.com), Read Print (http://www.readprint.com), Open Library (http://openlibrary.org), and Get Free e-Books (http://www.getfreeebooks.com). This is a short list of just a handful of the libraries that are now offering free e-content.

General-Interest Periodicals

General-interest periodicals are magazines and newsletters published regularly. Some popular magazines in this category include The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Smithsonian. These magazines are considered “general interest” because most people in the United States could pick up a copy of these magazines and find them interesting and topical.

Special-Interest Periodicals

Special-interest periodicals are magazines and newsletters that are published for a narrower audience. Some more widely known special-interest periodicals are Sports Illustrated, Bloomberg’s Business Week, GQ, Vogue, Popular Science, National Geographic, The Economist, and Scientific American. But for every major magazine, there are a great many other lesser-known magazines, like American Coin Op Magazine, Varmint Hunter, Fangoria, Shark Diver Magazine, Pet Product News International, and Water Garden News, to name just a few.

Newspapers, Blogs, and Newsgathering Agencies

Newspapers and blogs are other major sources of popular information. A few blogs (e.g., The Huffington Post, Talkingpoints Memo, The Daily Beast, Salon) function similarly to traditional newspapers. Furthermore, in the past few years we’ve lost many traditional newspapers around the United States; cities that used to have four or five daily papers may now only have one or two.

Major newspapers in the United States include The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Houston Chronicle, and USAToday, and major international English-language newspapers include The Guardian [London], The Independent [London], and The Irish Times. Most colleges and universities subscribe to a number of these newspapers in paper form or have access to them electronically. Furthermore, LexisNexis, a database many colleges and universities subscribe to, has access to full-text newspaper articles from these newspapers and many more around the world.

In addition to traditional newspapers, blogs are becoming a mainstay of information in today’s society. In fact, since the dawn of the twenty-first century, many major news stories have been broken by professional bloggers rather than traditional newspaper reporters (Ochman, 2007). Although anyone can create a blog, there are many reputable blog sites that are run by professional journalists. As such, blogs can be a great source of information. However, as with all information on the Internet, you often have to wade through a lot of junk to find useful, accurate information.

Finally, news-gathering organizations can also be reliable sources of popular information. News-gathering organizations may or may not be associated with a publication or network. For example, AP (Associated Press) and Reuters are wire services that sell content to newspapers and television stations worldwide from their network of reporters. Other reliable newsgathering sources include BBC News (United Kingdom), CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) News, PBS (Public Broadcasting System—United States), and Al Jazeera World News (analysis from the Middle East and worldwide).

Encyclopedias

Encyclopedias provide short, very general information about a topic and are available in both print and electronic formats, and their content can range from eclectic and general (e.g., Encyclopædia Britannica, Wikipedia) to the very specific (e.g., Encyclopedia of 20th Century Architecture, The Encyclopedia of the Zombie: The Walking Dead in Popular Culture and Myth, Listen to Punk Rock! Exploring a Musical Genre). It is important to keep in mind that general encyclopedias are designed to give only brief, fairly superficial summaries of a topic area. Thus, they may be useful for finding out what something is if it is referenced in another source, but they are generally not a useful source for your actual speech. In fact, many instructors do not allow students to use encyclopedias as sources for their speeches for this very reason. More specialized encyclopedias, however, often provide more detailed summaries of topics and include references.

One of the most popular online encyclopedic sources is Wikipedia. Like other encyclopedias, it can be useful for finding out basic information (e.g., what baseball teams did Catfish Hunter play for?) but will not give you the depth of information you need for a speech. Also keep in mind that Wikipedia, unlike the general and specialized encyclopedias available through your library, can be edited by anyone and therefore often contains content errors and biased information. If you are a fan of The Colbert Report, you probably know that host Stephen Colbert has, on several occasions, asked viewers to change Wikipedia content to reflect his views of the world. This is just one example of why one should always be careful of information on the web, but this advice is even more important when considering group-edited sites such as Wikipedia.

Websites

Websites are the last major source of nonacademic information. Unfortunately, you can spend hours and hours searching for information and never quite find what you’re looking for if you don’t devise an Internet search strategy. Try Googling your topic or key terms and see what the search engine suggests. Sometimes Google can suggest a more specific focus for your search. Next, if you find a web page with what looks like useful information, learn about the site. Go to its “about” section (and be suspicious of websites without an “about” section), or even try doing a separate Google search about the website and/or its author to learn more. Finally, don’t be misled by domain name endings. Just because a site ends in a .org doesn’t mean that the site was made by a legitimate organization because anyone can purchase these domain name endings. Sites ending in .gov or .edu, on the other hand, are reliable, since only U.S.-based government sector agencies and organizations (including state and local governments) and educational institutions are eligible to purchase them.

Scholarly (or Peer-Reviewed) Sources

Scholarly or peer-reviewed sources are the gold standard of reliable information, so many professors will require that you use some of these types of sources in your assignments. Scholarly sources are written by experts in their field, usually professors in a specific discipline. Scholarly sources contain the original research of these experts, which has been vetted by their peers, other experts in their field, who ensure that the research is based on the most recent and reliable scholarship in that discipline. Scholarly or peer-reviewed sources are usually found in academic journals and books published by university presses as well as some other publishers.

Below are some types of scholarly sources. To search for scholarly sources in your library’s catalog or databases, set a limiter that will confine your results to peer-reviewed sources, including academic journals.

Scholarly Books

Scholarly books are primarily written by academics for other academics who use this information to conduct their own research. Scholarly books are works of non-fiction that are published by university presses (Louisiana State University Press, Harvard University Press, University Press of Mississippi, for example) as well as a handful of other major publishers who specialize in scholarly books.

Some of these non-university presses specializing in academic books include:

SAGE Press
Routledge
Jossey-Bass
Pfeiffer
The American Psychological Association
The National Communication Association
Palgrave MacMillian
Scarecrow Press
McFarland
Polity Press
Alfred A. Knopf
Wiley Blackwell
Basic Books
Clarendon Press
John Wiley and Sons
Harper and Row
Pergamon Press
Random House
Springer

However, these books can be useful for non-academics as well because they contain original research and are thoroughly reviewed by other experts in the field prior to publication. To find information of interest in a scholarly book, try reading its table of contents to determine if a specific chapter focuses on your topic, or looking through the index in back for keywords related to your topic.

Scholarly Articles

Shorter scholarly work is published as articles in academic journals. Because every academic subfield has its own journals, you should never have a problem finding the best and most recent research on a topic.

Dissertations and Theses

Dissertations and theses are manuscripts written by PhD and master’s degree candidates. These manuscripts are also peer-reviewed sources because they must be approved by a panel of soon-to-be peers in the author’s field in order for them to graduate.

Evaluating Resources

Once you’ve found resources relevant to your topic, use the CRAAP method to evaluate them (“CRAAP Method”). CRAAP stands for “currency,” “relevance,” “authority,” “accuracy,” and “purpose,” or the five ways that you should evaluate each source to determine if it represents the best information available at the time. The CRAAP method was developed at Meriam Library at California State University.

Currency

When was the information created? Has the material been updated or revised?  How old is too old?  The answers to these questions depend on how quickly information changes in the field.

Consider the importance of currency for the following sources:

• An article on cancer treatments written in 1970
• A book about coronaviruses written in 1990
• An article about gender socialization written in 2000
• A history of the United States written in 1960.

Would this information still be good today, or might so many things have changed that the information needs to be updated?

Relevance

Is the information related to your research, and does it support your assignment?  Did you look at only one source?  Who is this written for?

How relevant would the following sources be for your paper?

• An article from a popular magazine or small local newspaper
• The first 5 results in a Google search
• The first 5 results in Discovery or one of the library’s other databases

Authority

Who or what created and published the information?  What credentials, affiliations, or experiences does the author have that are relevant to the topic? Can you easily find information about the author?  If the information came from a website, does the domain ending give us any clues about its authority?

Pro tip: website domains can help you evaluate the objectivity and quality of the information you’re looking at.  Only U. S. governmental agencies or educational institutions are able to purchase domain names ending in .gov or .edu. Other website domains like .com, .org, and .net can be purchased by anyone.  Don’t assume that a .org is more trustworthy than a .com.

Are the following authoritative sources?

• a tweet about a new variant of Covid by the CDC (Center for Disease Control)
• a peer-reviewed article on the efficacy of Covid vaccinations written by a team of scientists
• a guest article written by a politician about the efficacy of Covid vaccinations

Accuracy

Is this information factual? Has it been peer-reviewed?  Is the information supported by evidence?  Does the author credit their sources?  Are there grammatical or spelling errors?  Does the information seem to be wildly different from information you have read from other sources that you know are credible?

What might these elements say about whether or not a source is accurate:

• numerous citations found throughout
• misuse of “they’re”
• emotional language and tone
• information that can’t be verified anywhere else

Purpose

Why was this information created?  Was the information created to inform, teach, sell, entertain, or persuade you?  Is the purpose made clear?

Remember: information can have political, ideological, cultural, religious, institutional, or personal bias.  Is it fact, opinion, or propaganda?

What do you think the purpose of the following could be?

• an article written by Apple about the picture quality of the newest iPhone
• an article published by the NRA on gun control
• a study funded by Coca-Cola on the connection between sugar and depression

Reading Scholarly Sources

Because scholarly sources are written for experts in the author’s particular field, they use technical jargon to communicate precisely. Therefore, these sources can be more challenging to read than popular sources. Too, much research is conducted by quantitative researchers who rely on statistics to examine phenomena. As a result, reading scholarly sources takes more time and can be frustrating if you don’t have the basic knowledge to understand a complex technical field.

However, with a little patience, you too can read scholarly work if you follow the steps below.

Learn to Skim

If you sit down and try to completely read every article or book you find, it will take you a very long time to get through all the information. Instead, first skim the source.

Read the introduction (and abstract if you are using an article from an academic journal). Introductions and abstracts will give you a good idea of the source’s primary findings. If the first few paragraphs or the abstract don’t sound like they’re applicable to your topic, then the source is probably of no use to you. Be sure to make an entry in your research log about this discovery to prevent you from having to skim this source all over again.

If your source is a book, also look at the chapter headings in the table of contents. Chapter titles are more descriptive than fanciful, so they will give you a good idea about what is included in each. Reading the chapter titles could lead you directly to the part of the book that contains the information most relevant to your project.

Next, skim through the subheadings in the article or book chapter. Subheadings break down the articles and chapters by major ideas. Subheadings are usually in bold or italic type. The subheadings can lead you directly to the part of the article or book chapter most relevant to your research. If you read the headings and subheadings and nothing jumps out as relevant, that’s another indication that there may not be anything useful in that source.

If a subheading seems relevant to your topic, read the first sentence of every paragraph in that segment. The first sentence of each paragraph is the topic sentence, which is basically a paragraph’s thesis statement: well-written topic sentences tell the reader what the entire paragraph is about. Skimming the topic sentences can give you a better overview of the segment’s contents as well as bring you an exact place in the segment where you will find the information that you are looking for.

Also look for tables, charts, graphs, and figures, elements of some articles and books that put data into a format that allows the reader to understand how the information compares to other datasets.

Write down any words or phrases that you do not understand and Google them later. This is how you build your vocabulary so that you will have less trouble reading subsequent scholarly sources on the topic.

Lastly, take good notes while you’re skimming. Whenever you find relevant information in a source, note the location and type of that information in your research log so that you can return to the source later.

Read Bibliographies/Reference Pages

After you’ve finished reading scholarly (and even some non-scholarly sources), look at the bibliography or reference page at the end to see who that author cited. Often the sources cited by others can lead you to even better sources than the ones you found initially.

Ask for Help

Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Reference librarians are there to help you locate resources.