Religion and Theology - Information Competency: Finding relevant and solid sources

As a researcher your working material consists of academic publications, although other sources can also be helpful. For instance, Wikipedia works perfectly well if you need to know quickly what the birthdate was of an eminent figure from the past. Nevertheless, this chapter will focus on academic literature. This has to answer to other standards than popular scientific publications. 

Scientific publications are written by academics for academics. Their purpose is the presentation and discussion of research findings and the advancement of hypotheses and theories. Scientific publications generally consist of (most of) the following characteristics:

• An introduction explaining the research question
• Description of the method by which the issue or problem has been addressed
• Results in the form of observations, measurements and analyses
• Discussion of the results
• Conclusions of the research
• Reference sources supporting the research

Furthermore, if you are going to write an academic paper, you preferably want to use peer reviewed articles. These are articles that, before publication, have been reviewed extensively by peers in the academic field to make sure they are up to academic standards. Flawless research is impossible, but this method should prevent the biggest mistakes.

Searching for literature starts with asking yourself: what am I looking for? After all, the outcome of this question determines the scope of the literature search. In essence, it does not make a difference if you are writing a paper or an article, dissertation or a book. In all cases, there is the need for a solid research question and sub-questions. Therefore, take considerable time to think these through before rushing to the available databases and search engines. Note that literature search should be conducted for each subtopic of your research. This might or might not cover your research questions.

Of course, you are not just going wait for the right question to pop up. Several tips can be helpful in this process.

• Get familiar with a field of interest. Knowing what has already been written about a topic also means knowing what is nót yet been dealt with. There may be gaps or contradictions in the current research. Ask yourself who will benefit from an answer, and how so?
• Draft an outline. This will structure both the paper and the research itself. It can be of great help if you formulate a working title. Realize that a working title is of temporary use; dare to rephrase it once the research is done.
• Use brainstorming. Pick a piece of paper and write down everything which comes to mind and select good ideas. Another strategy may be to start clustering: write the main subject in the middle of a page, write subtopics around the hub, and connect them with arrows.
• Be sure to come up with a workable research question. This begins with: why, who, where, when, how or what.

More information about formulating a research question? Consult this presentation.

Ideally scientific publications are permanent and generally accessible. Limitations of any source are coverage (subjects, number of years etc.), library possession (i.e. printed works) or license agreements/ subscriptions. Academics can use scientific publications to keep adding to their own knowledge over time and to make their personal contributions to the advancement of science and human understanding.

The Vrije Universiteit believes that government-funded research should be available free of charge to as many people as possible. In order to stimulate Open Access publishing via the Golden Route, the VU has concluded OA agreements ('OA deals') with a large number of publishers.

The general rule is: literature databases often focus on a specialized academic discipline. Opposed to these are general, multidisciplinary databases. The latter are good sources to explore the field, while subject databases are good for more specialized search strategies.

Once you've selected ‘your’ database the actual searching starts. For optimal results there are some rules to keep in mind. Looking for literature using just one or two keywords is a great way to generally ‘explore’ the field and get an idea of what’s going on. You can combine these keywords using so-called operators: AND, OR and NOT.

The keywords you come up with up yourself may not necessarily be the terms used in science. Subject databases use keyword lists from the academic field: key concepts. Take for example the following phrase: " Religious groups like to comfort ill people." Religious academics would replace the common term 'help' with the more relevant 'sensegiving'. Developing yourself as a reseacher means, besides many other things, that you get acquainted with the jargon in your field of research.

Remember, different databases use different keywords and truncation rules!

Rule of thumb: subject databases don’t all use the same keywords. It is always a good idea to check the database’s keyword list or a thesaurus. On the other hand, many databases will automatically recognize what you type, and provide you with alternatives. Also, you can check if the search terms you chose in your strategy match the keyword list.

When you are searching for relevant keywords, don't be satisfied too quickly. Also think of alternative terms, possible synonyms, opposites, etc. For instance:

• sensegiving, religious meaning, perception, awareness, comfort etc.
• illness, ailment,malady etc.

To cover both plural and singular or different spellings, you may need to use special symbols to truncate a term or put in a wild card. Examples: organi?ation$ could mean organization, organizational, organizations or organisation, organisations, organisational. Check further explanation here. You may find different symbols in different databases. Therefore, check search tips in the database you are going to use which symbols apply.

Now you know where to search and how to do that. However this does not comprise the whole searching process. New issues may arise. For instance, searches can either provide too many hits or too few hits. Chances are that your search results force you to adjust your strategies. There are many ways to do this:

• define your subject as specific as possible
• formulate a search query

A general principle in science is to first make your subject more specific before you actually construct a search strategy. The linked Libguide explains which steps to take.

Once you have decided what to investigate, you need to narrow down the research to make your (re)search question more specific. You can do this by asking yourself five, simple, but effective questions, the so-called W-questions: who, what, where, when, why (and how).

For example take this research question:
Under what circumstances do business policies conflict with religious beliefs in religion based companies?

• What: business and religious beliefs
• Who: Humans
• When: their belief conflicts
• Where: USA or EU
• Why: to investigate if religious belief can conflict with making profit

Each time you answer the question the search becomes more specific. Search question: To investigate under which circumstances business policies can conflict with religious belief

Summarized

• Ask yourself so-called what, where, when, why, who (and how) questions. Each time you give yourself an answer you become more specific.
• Think of alternative and/ or related keywords.
• Put them all in one single string (preferably in Word, so you can use the same strategy in several databases).
• Copy - paste these strings into different fields in your search engine.

A search strategy could like like this:

• string one: conflict OR struggle OR strife OR contradict OR collide etc.
• AND
• string 2: business policy OR company policy OR business ethics OR corporate ethics
• AND
• string 3: belief OR conviction OR principles OR values OR faith OR opinion etc

AND and OR are written in capitals. This enables search engines to recognize these words as operators and not as part of a sentence.

Again, searching for information can result in an overwhelming amount of book- or article titles. On the other hand, not every title is as equally relevant or of the same quality. How can you determine which literature has higher status than others? 

A couple of factors determine the quality of journals

• Consider the source. Is it peer reviewed? In other words, has it been critically assessed by colleagues from your field? If not, your source probably does not meet the highest scientific standard.
• Check the number of citations. Articles cited more frequently than others are often considered more important. At the very least you could say is that they had a thorough influence on the scientific debate. 
• Academic journals are graded with so-called impact factors. Impact Factors are used to measure the importance of a journal by calculating the number of times selected articles are cited within the last few years. The higher the impact factor, the more highly ranked the journal. This is one tool you can use to compare journals in a subject category.
• For more about impact factors, you can check the frequently asked questions on MDAnderson.
   

Solid sources preferably have high impact factors. However, when determining the quality of an article keep in mind that:

• The scientific worth of an individual article has nothing to do with the impact factor of a journal.
• A subject that’s very dynamic, or has many researchers, produces more literature than other subjects, and therefore is cited more often. This does not mean that less cited works are less important.
• At all times, keep in mind that impact factors are an indication of quality, not of absolute worth.

To look up impact factors for the social sciences SSCI: