Completing your assignments

Following the advice provided by your module team or supervisor on the topic for the assignment, make sure you understand what is being asked of you. Clarify the meaning of the topic and particular words, using general or subject specific dictionaries/encyclopaedias if necessary.

Consider what you already know in this area and what you might need to understand more before you start you’re searching. A general text book on the area will provide you with background information to help understand more about the topic before you do any detailed searching.

If the subject area/topic is too general you may need to choose a specific aspect of it otherwise there will be too much literature for you to read and evaluate. Always check with your module study guide/lecturers what they are expecting you to cover in the assignment and whether they have set you any parameters to work within, for example a date range, specific methodology etc.

Think about constraints, for example:

• How long your project/essay needs to be and are you required to do within it. If you need to refer to published literature all the way through the essay you will need more sources than when you are also writing up practical work you have conducted.
• How much time you have and what you can feasible read in this time period.
• What help and resources you might need and whether they are available to you. Build in time to ask for support in using resources that you are unfamiliar with.

Define your topic in terms of keywords to use for searching the various information sources. There are different ways to approach this task including making lists of words, diagrams or mind maps. Chose a method that works for you.

In order to make your search as comprehensive as possible, you should think about the following:

• Broader and narrower terms to the concepts you are searching on
• Layman terms, medical teams and technical terms that could have been used by the author
• Words that may be used as alternatives for your topic (synonyms) e.g. 'staff or employees' or 'work or employment'
• Alternative spellings, particularly American ones, e.g. 'labour or labor'
• Possible truncations e.g. manage* will retrieve manage(ment), manage(rs) and manage(rial)

Look at ways to link your keywords. Boolean searching is the name given to the method of searching that uses the words AND, OR and NOT as operators to link keywords in a logical way to include or exclude certain terms.

OR is a good technique to use when there are different ways of expressing the same term, for example

"heart attack" OR "Myocardial infarction".

Once you have your words, you need to organise them and combine them together when searching in the databases and search engines.

If you have a phrase and you want the search engine to treat it as a phrase, the general rule is to enclose it in speech marks, for example "global warming".

Set limits to your search, for example:

• Publication date - how far back do you want to search?
• Range - what types of publication or documentation do you wish to include? Do you want to include newspaper articles, data sources, statistics for example?
• Geographical - do you want to limit your search to material relating to a particular country or other geographical area?
• How much do you need to find - the number of sources you need to consult will depend on the length of assignment and type of assignment
• What methodologies you would like the research you are finding to have used

Draw up a list of sources/databases to search and carry out your searches.

Now that you know the subject areas you want to find information on, you can see which sources will contain information on these topics. Sources may be print-based others digital.

For some topics, certain sources will offer you more information than others. Consider where an author may have published or made available information on your topic, what would have been the logical place open for that author to use. For academic authors, this could be books, journals, conference papers; for information from industry that might be online reports, magazines, websites.

We have created subject-specific guides to resources in the Library to help you understand where you can search. As well as providing information about how to obtain material relevant to your subject, they supply links to some of the resources increasingly available electronically.

The Library search engine, LibSearch, is a quick way to begin your search for subject information and to identify the key sources for your subject.  It allows you to search the book collection, databases, and collections of e-journals and newspaper articles all at the same time. It's a great starting point for your research. However, you may also need to do more detailed searching via individual electronic databases.

Consider the formats you think will provide useful information and then chose the search engine/database that would provide results from that format.

Always keep in mind it is quality not quantity that it key.

Keep a record of your searches. An essential part of literature searching is keeping accurate, consistent and correct records.

Record all useful references. The useful references should be recorded from print-based sources or marked and downloaded from electronic databases. A detailed record of everything useful you find will enable you to provide an accurate reference list at the end of your project and in-text citations throughout your work.

It is important to carry out a review of your progress after an initial search.

• Have you found material that is likely to be relevant to your topic?
• Evaluate what you have found in terms of relevance, reliability, currency, limitations and bias. It is the quality, not the quantity of the material that counts.
• How many different voices are represented in the literature you have discovered?
• How many different ideas/thoughts/differences have you found?
• What is limiting you finding certain authors, ideas, outputs? Often this comes down to where you are searching and the keywords you are using

Once you have reviewed what you have found, refer back to your original plan and decide whether you need to do more searching. If you do, consider whether you need to adapt the keywords you are using and the search engines/databases.

It is very important to allow sufficient time to obtain copies of useful references. Most databases will have a mixture of full-text articles and bibliographic citations plus abstracts (summaries) of articles. Check LibSearch to see if the Library stocks the items you require. If the items you require are not available in full text via our Library they may be obtained via Inter-Library Loan, but make sure you have enough time before ordering.

The quality of the information you will find when searching will vary enormously depending on the sources you use. Therefore, it is important to be able to distinguish between the types of information you have found, evaluate what you have found and read it critically. Some questions to think about:

• Is this a primary or secondary text? (i.e. is it the original research/source of information or is it an evaluation/summary/discussion text) Both will be useful in your research, you just need to be sure which one you are reading.
• Who is the author and what is their authority in the subject area?
• When was it written? (i.e. is it still relevant to today, is it out of date and so should be disregarded or is it seminal (so ground breaking/influential to the research that took place after it was written)
• Why was it written? (i.e. what influences/biases do you need to be aware of)
• What limits are there to the work? (i.e. what did the authors of the work set out to research, what were they not able to cover? What bearing does that have for your research?)
• Does it agree / disagree with what you already knew or have read? Note these differences down
• What is the evidence? (i.e. make sure you are not just reading the conclusions and that the author is backing up their statements)
• Are they quoting others work or their own? If they are quoting the work of others, do follow this up and find the original source (if you can) as this will provide you with further context and detail.

Make sure you are noting down the arguments/evidence not just summary sentences so that you can refer in your work to the core of the information source.

Also make sure you are reading actively and keep testing yourself. Can you close the source and remember the key things it was mentioning and explain them to someone else. This is a good sign you have understood the source and will help with paraphrasing and referencing the work in your assignment.

Keep notes are you are reading. Within your own writing, you will quite often be combining sources together, for example ones that agree about certain points, ones that have contrasting views etc, so try and see whether you can do this in your notes to make it easier when you start doing your writing. This could be in the form of a summary table.

Writing needs to be accompanied by a properly formatted reference list and in-text citations. Please refer to the correct referencing style guide for your subject (APA, OSCOLA or Harvard Cite Them Right).

Copyright advice for staff and students can be found on our dedicated Copyright Guide. If you need advice on copyright you can also speak to your Subject Librarian. You can also access general copyright information from the Copyright Licensing Agency or the UK Copyright Service.