When you are searching for academic literature it is a good idea to see if there is a discipline specific database to search in.
Subjects A to Z contains links to the most used databases and research guides at the University of Toronto that have been curated by liaison librarians that work in that area.
Developing a research question is a skill that requires practice to develop. Questions that are too narrow or broad will not yield good search results. When research questions are too broad you will get a lot of results for your question, but most will not be relevant to your project. Some examples of research questions that are too broad are listed below.
When you have a question that is too broad, break it down. Ask yourself, what do I mean by X, Y or Z. For example, If you want to know about how well vehicles operate under humid conditions, what do you mean by humid conditions? What do you mean by vehicles? What do you mean by operate? You may need to first start by asking questions about what the definition of high humidity is in a specific region? What type of vehicle are you doing research on? Commercial, army, construction, or personal ones? What do you mean by operate? How do you define operate? In terms of operation do you mean the navigation system, the tires, the engine?
If you are struggling to narrow down a research question that is too broad, please visit the Reference Desk.
Developing a research question is a skill that requires practice to develop. Questions that are too narrow or broad will not yield good search results. When research questions are too narrow you will not get results for your search. Some examples of research questions that are too narrow are listed below.
When you have a question that is too narrow, you have to think of the bigger picture. If you cannot find information about a very specific group of people (e.g., residents living in the North East Corner of the Banbury-Don Mills Neighbourhood in Toronto) could a wider group of people that represent them provide you with insight (e.g. residents of East Toronto, or could doing demographic research on the residents in question and finding information about other Canadians of the same age or socio-economic status answer your question)? If you need to know the physical properties of a specific item (e.g. toy car wheel) can you find out the material that item is made out of and find the physical property of that material using a handbook instead?
If you are struggling with a research question that is too narrow, please visit the Reference Desk.
For some research questions information may not be available to the public or the information may not exist.
For economic reasons, trade secrets, proprietary information, specifications on how a product is made or how it works may not be available to you. Sensitive information like health information, identity information, government information, financial statistics, security information may not be available to you. Data is expensive to collect, store, document and share. Even though you may think a particular set of data is useful, it may not exist due barriers caused by lack of funding.
In cases where information is inaccessible or does not exist, you may have to get creative in your research question and triangulate with several questions or use information from similar situations to support your ideas. This type of research can be quite tricky. If you need help with this type of research please ask at the Reference Desk.
Once you have your research question, you need to ask a database to retrieve information for you. When you ask a database a question you have to be specific and use language that the database is programmed to recognize. A database, much like a computer program, will not infer meaning from your question, and will execute the search exactly as you ask it.
Step #1: Write down your research question and underline the key concepts in your question. These key concepts are ideas that must ALL be present in the information that the database retrieves.
For example, if you are interested in finding out what types of climate change initiatives are taking place in North American universities, you would underline concepts such as: climate change, initiatives, North America and university.
Step #2: Since different people use different words to describe the same thing, you may need to brainstorm other ways of saying your main concepts to ensure you do not miss key information.
For example: climate change could also be called global warming, etc.. North America, could be Canada, U.S.A., United States, Mexico, etc.
Step #3: Combine your concepts and synonyms with Boolean operators. Using AND between concepts, OR between synonyms and brackets to nest terms.
For example: (climate change OR global warming) AND (initiative OR program) AND (North America OR N. America OR Canada) AND (university OR college OR post-secondary institution)
Use the style guide above to help you format your references. The guide contains many, but not all types of sources that you may cite as an engineer. If you are trying to cite a source that is not listed in the guide above, you can have a look at the Chicago Manual of Style (see link below) that IEEE Citation Style is based on. Still can't find your source type? In the case that neither the guide or the manual contains the source type you need to cite then select the source type that is the closest to your source an modify it to include ALL of the information that one would require to find the original source. Remember, we cite to give attribution to the original author an to allow the reader to find the original source for verification. If your citation does not include ALL of the information the reader needs to find the source your citation is not working!
