Tips on doing research.

1. TIPS TO KNOW BEFORE YOU BEGIN YOUR RESEARCH
1. Before you begin research for your dissertation or thesis, while you are still taking
classes, find out which documentation style will be required. Check both your
department and the graduate school guidelines for theses and dissertations.
a. Buy the manual for the documentation style that you will be required to use
and begin familiarizing yourself with it. If your professors do not require a
different style, practice using it while writing papers in your classes, whether
the information in those papers will be included in your thesis or dissertation
or not.
b. Be aware that the style guides and manuals often include guidelines for
much more than simply bibliographic information. Some specify how
chapter titles and headings within chapters are to be formatted, how to
handle various types of abbreviations in the text, and how to format tables
and illustrations or figures. Practice following those guidelines.
c. If you are allowed to choose the style you will use, choose one that specifies
parenthetical in-text citations with a final list of references rather than one
with notes and a bibliography.
i. Inserting footnotes or endnotes tends to be more difficult than using
parenthetical citations.
ii. Duplicating the bibliographic information in notes in the final
bibliography takes more time and uses more paper and ink in
printing.
iii. Some word processors do not allow you to specify where endnotes
will be displayed. Having endnotes fall at the very end of a document,
after the bibliography and appendices, is usually not acceptable.
2. As you do your research, build a list of your resources, following the required
documentation style as closely as possible.
a. Many different bibliographic software programs are available, and
comparative reviews are available online. (Two good ones are
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management
_software and http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Bibliographic
_Software_and_Standards_Information.) In addition, Word 2007 has a
built-in database for managing sources in various documentation styles.
NOTE:
i. Most bibliographic software programs will do the basics:
alphabetizing, putting certain information in italics depending on type
of source, putting the elements of the entry into the correct order for
the documentation style selected. However, some may not apply the
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2. correct type of case for article and book titles. (If you capitalize all
words, including conjunctions and prepositions, the capitalization will
appear in the list. If you enter a title in sentence case but use a
documentation style that requires headline case, the appropriate
words in titles will not begin with capital letters.)
ii. Some programs may not abbreviate state names for place of
publication.
iii. Using a software program does not obviate the need to check your
spelling as you go and have your information complete and correct.
iv. If you are having someone else edit or proofread your document, the
final bibliography may not hold any changes made to the document
on a different computer. The bibliographic software program is linked
to your document and will usually override any changes made on a
different computer when it is opened again on the computer with the
bib software.
v. Bibliographic software programs are databases, and you will need to
familiarize yourself with how your chosen program works.
b. You can use a spreadsheet program. You will need to enter the information
in the correct format, with elements in the correct order, for the
documentation style you are using, but you can use the sort function to
alphabetize the final list.
c. Keep the list in a separate word processing file. Many people use this
tried-and-true method. You will need to alphabetize the entries yourself, but
you will also be able to control how abbreviations and title case display.
3. As you locate sources, be sure to record all of the information needed for a
complete bibliographic entry. Besides all authors’ names, date of publication, and
title of the book or article, be sure to record the following:
a. For a book, record the edition number if it is later than the first edition, the
city and state (U.S.), province (Canada), or country where the publisher is
located, and the correct spelling of the publisher’s name. (Documentation
styles vary concerning how publishers’ names are to be treated. Knowing
your documentation style at this stage can save you time later.)
b. If the source you are documenting is a chapter in a book that is a collection
of articles by different authors, be sure to record the names of all editors and
the page range for the chapter you are documenting.
c. For newspaper articles accessed online, be sure you record the full name of
the newspaper (not just the shortened version sometimes used online) and
the city and state or country in which the newspaper is published. (Many
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3. cities and towns have local newspapers called The Times, The Gazette,
The Chronicle, etc. Make sure you know where the article was published.
Not only is that information important for your documentation, but it may be
important to understanding the tone of the article.)
d. For a journal article, record the full journal title (Journal of Accounting
Research, not J Account Res), the volume number, the issue number, and
the page range for the article. A volume generally includes all the issues
published in one year. Most journals follow the calendar year in determining
volume numbering.
NOTE:
i. Get in the habit of recording the volume number first, the issue
number second, and the page-range numbers last. A common error
that students make is confusing the numbers or putting them in the
wrong order in the entry.
ii. Most documentation styles indicate that the issue number should be
dropped when the journal uses continuous pagination (issues after
the first in a volume continue page numbering from the previous
issue). To learn how to determine the pagination type, see item g.
e. For any journal article that is available online, record the DOI (document
object identifier) if one has been assigned. The DOI is used in place of a
URL in the entry for an article. To learn how to find the DOI, see item g.
f. If you use an online database to conduct metasearches (e.g., EBSCO,
ProQuest, PsychINFO), most documentation styles do not permit use of
URLs that begin with the name of database or contain search terms (usually
interspersed with such symbols as equal signs, ampersands, and other
question marks). You should use the DOI if it is provided in the database;
otherwise, you should locate the article at the journal publisher’s site.
g. To find some of the information indicated above, you may need to go to the
journal site.
i. Begin by searching for the journal by its full title.
ii. At the homepage for the journal, look for a link that indicates
“Archives” or “Previous issues.” (This link could appear in a sidebar
either to the right or to the left of the page. Occasionally, it will appear
in a horizontal list of links near the top of the page below the site
header.)
iii. If you cannot find such a link on the homepage, follow the link to view
the current issue or table of contents for the current issue. Very often,
links to previous issues appear only in relation to the current issue.
(Many journals make the full content of their articles available online
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4. for free, and nearly all of them post the tables of contents of past
issues online.)
iv. When you have found the archives (previous issues), you will need
to know both the year and the volume number of the article you are
searching for. Most journals list their previous issues’ tables of
contents in one of two ways:
1. In an expansion list with date and volume number:
expands to
Note that this list includes the month (generally not used in the
documentation) and the page ranges for each issue. At this
point, you can identify whether the journal uses continuous
pagination (as the one above does) by observing the page
numbers for the issues.
2. In a table with links identified by year (not volume):
Such links typically lead to a page with the volume identified
and the issues listed:
Again, at this point, you can identify the pagination type of the
journal. If a journal has continuous pagination, do not include
the issue number in your bibliographic (reference) entries.
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5. v. To find the DOI for an article, you will need to delve more deeply by
selecting the link to the specific issue in which your source article
was published.
Very often, the DOI for an article in an issue will be listed with the
article info in the online table of contents.
Sometimes, you must follow the link to the article, and the DOI will
appear in the publication information for the article (usually above
the article to the left):
This information can usually be found even for articles that are not
freely available online.
h. When no DOI is available, a URL may be admissible, depending on the
documentation style and how the article was accessed. (Consult your
documentation style for specifics.)
i. When you find articles listed in ERIC, if the article was self-published and
uploaded to ERIC, use the ERIC document number. If the document
number begins with EJ, it is a published journal article. For such items listed
in ERIC, you should copy the title, authors’ names, and journal publication
information and then go to the journal site and verify the information.
4. If you are using copy-and-paste while building your bibliography, take steps to
protect the formatting of your document:
a. In Word 2007, go to the Office Button (in the upper left corner):
Select Word Options (at the bottom of the small window that opens).
Select Advanced (at the left of the next screen).
Under “Cut, copy, and paste,” select Match Destination Formatting for the
various types of pasting.
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6. b. Even when you have made those changes, you may still have words from a
web page paste into your document in a different font face, size, or color. Be
watchful for such font changes and manage them as you go. Select from a
couple of characters or spaces before the pasted text to a few spaces or
characters after the pasted text. Then apply the font changes.
c. When copying and pasting a URL, very often, it will appear as an active link.
Change the URL to regular text by placing the cursor anywhere in the URL,
right-clicking, and selecting Remove Hyperlink.
Very often, the URL will not be hyperlinked until you type a space or line
break after the URL. Holding down the control key (CTRL) while typing a “z”
(the undo keyboard shortcut) will usually make the hyperlink disappear and
return the URL to plain text.
5. Finally, remember that, while copying and pasting documentation information
(authors’ names, titles, publication information for sources) from web pages for
inclusion in your bibliographic entries is acceptable, copying and pasting text from
an online article without indicating that it is directly quoted (using quotation marks
or block quotation formatting) and without citing the source is plagiarism.
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