Library & Information Science
For additional assistance, contact Mary Feeney
Tips for Finding Research Studies
Learn tips to identify different types of research studies
Find research studies from journals in Library Science
Learn tips to identify different types of research studies
How do you know if a research study is a particular type of study? How do you know if a research study utilizes a particular type of statistics?
Tip 1: Some articles will specifically tell you what type of study was conducted or research methodology was used:
"Discusses the results of a qualitative study..."
"We apply descriptive statistics..."
Tip 2: For whatever type of research study or example of statistical methodology you want to find, think about what defines that type of study or method:
What makes a study an “X” study?
What are the methods used for conducting “X” type of study and analyzing the results?
Tip 3: As you read through research articles, look for words associated with a particular type of study or statistical method. These are some examples:
Qualitative: interviews, observations, ethnography (or ethnographic)
Quantitative: correlation, causal, experimental, experiment, empirical, sample
Inferential statistics: chi-square tests, analysis of variance (ANOVA), t-tests, regression
Descriptive statistics: distribution, mean, average, median, standard deviation, correlation
Survey/questionnaire: survey, interview, questionnaire, focus group
Bibliometrics: citation analysis, content analysis, bibliometric research, bibliometric analysis, scientometrics, informetrics
Find research studies from journals in Library Science
How do you find research articles from journals in LIS and related fields?
Browse through articles in peer-reviewed journals.
Look for articles that contain some of the words above (e.g., survey, citation analysis, etc.) In Part I: Peer-Reviewed Journals, you learned how to identify whether a journal is peer-reviewed and how to get a list of refereed LIS journals. Check to see if the UA Library has paper or electronic access to these journals by searching the UA Library Catalog by Journal Title. You can then browse through the articles.
Search databases that include citations/abstracts to research articles in peer-reviewed journals. Use words above that describe different types of studies as your search terms.
To access databases for Library Science from the library homepage (http://www.library.arizona.edu):
- Click on Article & Database Searching
- Choose Library & Information Science from the “Find Databases in your SUBJECT area” menu
- Choose Library Literature, LISA (Library & Information Science Abstracts), LISTA (Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts), or INSPEC.
Library Literature and LISA are the major databases for library science. Generally, LISA includes more abstracts (summaries of the articles) than Library Lit does, so you may want to start there.