Team Collaboration: Division of the Research Task
Each team member should locate at least three reliable, recently published articles from credible business or trade journals. Team members consult each other as they conduct their research to make sure the team searches several appropriate databases and gathers around 10 articles from reliable scholarly journals or trade magazines.
They decide what pieces of information from which articles to include in their literature review. To fulfill the purpose of the research project, they will probably be most interested in the strategies the authors suggest, or which other organizations have used, to address the problem. The team evaluates the articles they collect, and narrow the collection to the best articles.
This may be a good time to remind students that although all members of the team will receive the grade awarded to the project, individual team member's grades may be lowered if the instructor has sufficient credible evidence that a particular student failed to meet his or her obligations to the team.
Library Research Tips to Share with Students
1. Encourage students to seek a wide variety of recently published articles from academic journals, trade journals, professional journals, or other periodicals.
2. Suggest some good indexes to start their research, such as Business Source Elite, J-Store, Lexis-Nexus, and the Expanded Academic Index.
3. Remind students to use the SFX link to INDYCAT to see if our library holds the journals or books they need, and to search for journal articles using the title of the journal, not the title of the article. (Searching with the title of the article is the most common error students make.)
4. Encourage students to make sure the sources they have gathered will provide relevant information:
5. They should look for articles that provide solutions, not which simply confirm the existence of the problem. For example, a newspaper article that reports on the problem without suggesting how to solve it may not be very helpful.
· They should not focus their research on the issue the organization deals with. The organization as audience will not need that information; its members already know why the organization exists. Background information as it relates to the problem under investigation is relevant, and causes and effects of the problem should be examined, but the main focus should be how to solve the problem.
· Generally, students should not use sources published by the organization or business targeted in their project. (Students often lose awareness of their audience during library research, and think they have solved their research problems by gathering several brochures or other publications about their organization.)
If students find a source that is "just what they're looking for," they can identify the descriptors in the abstract and plug those new search terms into the database search. They should also look at the article's reference page to find the key sources the author used and try to locate those in our library through INDYCAT.
If students come up with too many hits while searching an electronic index, they can narrow the search field by
1. Using the thesaurus feature of the database, which is an official list of all subject headings.
2 Using the index of the database to identify and redefine search terms.
3. Using AND to narrow the search. (OR can be used to enlarge the search.)
4. Limiting the search to only those articles written in English.
5. Determining if the database has a lit review of significant articles on the topic.
6. Narrowing the topic.
Teams should be urged not to select more than a few articles from the same publication. They are expected to gather information from various sources representing various points of view.
Although students may consult the dictionary or encyclopedia, most instructors agree they should not be used or listed as sources.
Organizational pamphlets or documents are usually considered primary, not secondary, and are probably inappropriate for the literature review.
Remind students they are looking mainly for recently published scholarly works, such as academic journals and trade journals, rather than popular magazines.
If they are experiencing difficulties finding sources, suggest they try the philanthropy, the medical, or law libraries if appropriate. The Philanthropy library is located on the second floor of University Library and has many sources for topics related to fund raising, volunteerism, and not-for-profit organizations.
Discuss considerations concerning, and evaluation of, sources from the Internet. Advise students to carefully evaluate the information presented in each article by asking the same questions that a skeptical reader would ask:
· Is it accurate?
· Is it complete?
· Is it up-to-date?
· Is it unbiased?
· Is it supported by evidence my readers will find compelling?
· Does it conflict with other evidence?
· Is it clearly relevant to my readers' situation?
Once the team has gathered and read all the articles they plan to use, they need to
· re-read the articles, identifying and categorizing the key questions/issues the authors address.
· sort the literature using these categories. The best way to do this is to construct a grid of common points. This grid lists every question/issue they have identified and then briefly describes how each of the sources responds to this issue.
To divide the work of composing the literature review, the team should collaborate on the introduction and conclusion, making sure the focus is on the literature. Each team member should accept responsibility for drafting one or two sections of the literature review, depending on how many sections are needed. To draft a section, students should work from one row of the grid, incorporating and contextualizing the material in that row. The section may be one paragraph in length or it may be as long as a page or two, depending on the amount of material gathered related to the particular subtopic or issue.
As they start drafting based on the grid, advise students that they cannot merely list their sources and summarize the contents. They must illustrate how the sources agree, how the sources disagree, and how the sources overlap by providing ample connections to lead readers to see the relationships among the sources. Each row of the grid should be used to create one section of the review to ensure organization of the paper by key points, not by source. Teams will work together to combine the sections into a coherent literature review.