EDRS 704: Foundations of Qualitative Research: Research Tips and Strategies

Keyword searching is the most common strategy for finding secondary sources. However, you should not rely on keyword searches alone. There are number of other strategies that you can utilize to cast a wider research net. Incorporating the additional research strategies listed below may help you find sources that traditional keyword searching missed. 

• Mine the footnotes and bibliography of the secondary sources you already have (backward citation searching).
• Use the "cited by" feature on Google Scholar to find new secondary sources you may have missed (forward citation searching).
• Use Google's site/domain level search feature to find reliable data and other resources freely available on the web.
  • e.g., "site:gov extremism" -or- "site:data.gov extremism"
• Use multiple academic databases; DO NOT rely on just one (indexing and discoverability). 
• Use boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) when searching academic databases.
• When searching the library catalog, use the subject heading hyperlinks within each book record to find other books with the same "tag."
• When retrieving books from the stacks, browse the books nearby to find additional titles (academic libraries are organized by subject).

  You can ​​​​​use Google's site/domain level search feature to find reliable data and other resources freely available on the web

Where you look for data depends on the type of data you need.

There are two types of data:

Free/Open Access e.g., government, NGO, and non-profit organizations data

• Discoverable through search engines such as Google and websites such as Kaggle.com or census.gov

Paid access (behind paywalls) e.g., commercial data

• Discoverable through library databases such as Statista and Statistical Abstracts