Teach me how to research...

Factual Questions
1

As the internet gets more and more stuffed with clickbait and purposefully biased articles written to annoy or bolster the righteousness of the reader I’ve found it’s getting harder and harder to actually find info I’m looking for.

I know a lot of you do a lot of research, so what sites do you find are the best?

For instance if you were going to write a paper or write an article on something that’s hard to find much data for, like female on male domestic violence for instance (this isn’t a political statement, it’s just that I tried to look this topic up and the search engine gave me thousands of results for male on female (I know, “male on female” is the same to a search engine as “female on male”)).

So say I wanted to find some full studies where would I start? Every time I try to learn about something, like I was recently trying to get educated on children being given puberty blockers. I haphazardly, by chance found a study but it led to a journal that told me I needed to pay to read beyond the first page.

Are there any sites with full studies for free? Or at least the info from these studies?

Anyway it would be incredibly helpful if you’d share your favorite sites for research (please don’t just say “Google!” unless of course that really is the answer…) for studies most of all (I hear lots of people say “I read this in a study…” yet they never seem to know what site that “study” came from) and maybe archives of academic articles and stuff like that.

I tried to use Google to find some Hitler quotes and was horrified to find the first 30 pages were just links to news articles from sites that were giving a partial quote (all seemed to quoting EACH OTHER!) and it took me way longer than it should have for me to track where this quote came from down. So any tips, favorite sites etc would be massively appreciated.

Also, I know this might be asking a lot, walk me through what your typical “research routine” would be?

My experience, up until now, is that if I want to get some really, really interesting, uncommon knowledge on a subject I have to find a good book on it. But surely there are websites with this same info on them? Maybe free libraries? Anyway please help!

2

Google Scholar lets you search just journal articles.

Most high-profile journals charge for access. There has been a push for open access, but its penetration varies by field. There are sometimes ways to access them anyway, but they’re probably not legal and I expect the mods would rain down brimstone if we discussed details.

Depending on topic, you may find good information from government reports and databases. BLS and Census for labor and demographics. FBI and CDC may be a good start on your domestic violence question. All sorts of good stuff out there. Organizations like Pew often write relatively neutral analyses on these data. If you don’t mind (or maybe you want) a political bent, the list gets longer.

You can also start threads here on specific topics and watch us argue.

3

Adding site specifiers can help with Google searches:
female on male domestic violence statistics site:CDC.gov

4

good question Pooclear War

A usual first stop for me is Google Scholar. In some ways like Google was in olden times, without the clickbait, ‘Best prices for Hitler Quotes’ and such. Aimed mainly at academic writing, it also unevenly references the sites where increasingly people put their unpublished research, which is more likely to provide the big data munching reports, like Arxiv, Research Gate and Academia. As you found, most research in most academic fields is still behind journal paywalls.

In Google Scholar its easy to search on keywords or major writers in a particular field. If you were after survival after nuclear war you might enter ‘nuclear war survival Strangelove’. You’d get a list of Dr Strangelove’s different publications, and beneath each is a link that is ‘Cited By XXX’. Click on that and it takes you to all the works that have made reference to that Strangelove article. From there its relatively easy to see how current his ideas are, what they find useful, any critiques and so on.

On the right hand side of the page there may be a link - if so, that’s a freebie. I’m sure there must be a way of searching only for references that offer open access links, but haven’t found it.

The other way is very old fashioned. You email the author of a work to send you a PDF. Way back last century you’d wait a month and get a little packet with a reprint - a printed copy of the article -with something scribbled on it like ‘Hi Banksiaman, all the best for your survival after the big one. Dr S’.

If you’re after bulk data it really depends on the field - others here can safely guide you.

5

If you find yourself asking questions that can be answered using large public databases but that aren’t addressed in summary reports, an API and a bit of code (R is nice for this) can get you what you need.

6

Thanks! I forgot about Pew (makes laser gun noise pew pew!… sorry).

If you have more politically biased sources then please list them! I’ll just make sure my biased cap is firmly on when I visit it. It’s just annoying when you search and ONLY get politically biased sources that all lean the same way. So please let me know what they are.

I mean I hate this but for the origin of the Hitler quote I think I ended up on some dodgy “Storm” site. My ad blocker was on though so it’s okay.

I’ve asked this in a few other places like on Reddit, like what people use for their research on the political subs… and was(n’t) shocked to see how few people actually DO double check what they’re told. Maybe 1 or 2 out of every 100 replies shared what sites they use.

I was having a snoop on Google Books after trying to research “the sneaky bastard strategy” (a strategy where beta male animals wait until 2 alpha males are distracted fighting each other and quickly, and sneakily, mate with one of the “alpha’s” females!) and someone said they found a copy of Scientific American on Google Books. That impressed me. It was the whole issue for free! (It was actually hilariously written. Something I don’t see in new issues.) so I’ll definitely check out Google Scholar too.

Does anyone know how they used to do it in the old days? Like if I went to a library wanting to research male on female, what would I do? Did they have like a massive book index with subjects in? Or would they find the closest genre and just start reading like a maniac?

Anyway keep those sources coming! Pew is interesting. For me these stats are sort of like Twitter… once I start reading them I can’t stop. I feel so nosy…

7

I can program quite well in C++ so I might take a look at this R thingy. Any recommendations on the databases and where to find them? :stuck_out_tongue:

8

Thanks! I’ll definitely dedicate tonight to using Google Scholar. I was actually considering emailing an author after reading a page of their old study. I couldn’t afford what the journal site was asking for just 1 pdf. I’m just a lowly student of physics, engineering and computer science so maybe they’d help me out.

I don’t know why I grew up under the assumption that studies were published for free in public… I thought they were sort of like police reports.

9

Thanks I’ll try that. I’ll look for a site with all the advance commands. I’ve been using the “date” function a little more often recently. Very handy for seeing how attitudes have changed in how news stories are reported. The relatively dry, centrist authors from 1998 compared to todays who ANGRILY lean as far left or right as humanly possible is quite shocking.

10

The libraries had this thing called a card catalog. It’s like a database, except it’s on paper. And for magazine and journal articles, we had to use the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. Again, like a database, but on paper, but this time bound into volumes.

Today, I recommend that you check with your local public library. (Believe it or not, some of them still exist.) They may have relevant printed materials, or allow you to access online magazines and journals, perhaps through a service like EBSCO.

11

EPI and Heritage, which are lefty-loosey and righty-tighty, respectively. Opinions will differ on their relative level of bias.

Depends where you’re looking, but a search for threeletteracronym API or data access/set can do it. RStudio is a nice user interface. I’m still a noob at this and haven’t gotten much farther than tutorial.csv, but you’re often dealing with stuff that will make Excel excplode.

12

Google Scholar is great; however, you have to be careful even there because there’s a lot of junk published these days and they don’t filter such things out.

Once you’ve found an interesting and relevant article you need to assess the source.

  1. Is it a book?

Books by well-respected researchers are great; however, books are the absolute easiest thing to get published. If you have the money you can very easily find somebody to publish your book.

  1. Is it in a conference proceedings?

Determining whether a conference is of high quality or not is easy when you get an invitation to send a paper to them. Basically, if they’re emailing you blind to ask for a paper, they’re junk (I got a request for a paper from a nursing conference today… my research has nothing to do with nursing). However, determining whether a conference was junk or not from just a proceedings can be tricky. For the layperson, I’d suggest trying to stay away from conference proceedings and stick with journals.

  1. Is it a journal?

There are two ways to see if a journal is a good quality. Look for the impact factor (how often papers are cited by other academic papers) and/or ranking. A journal that is not ranked by the major academic indices might be a junk journal and so the paper may be of low quality. Journals that publish high quality articles tend to have higher impact factor as the findings will be cited more often. Be careful of self-reported impact factor!

With regards to your specific inquiry, I start with the most basic core concept. In this case, “violence against men”. I know this will be too broad but by looking at the literature I’ll get an idea of what I need to search for. Looking through various papers I see the term “female-to-male” used frequently. So I change the search to ‘“female-to-male” violence’ and then look again. So you can do iterative refinement this way (although with these term I found a few potentially interesting articles).

13

If you include the quotes in the search string, this is not true at least for google. It searches for that string. For example, “female on male violence” just produced 12,000 for me while “male on female violence” produced 9940 results.

14

Another tip, when starting to research a topic you’re not familiar with, is to look for review articles first (just add “review” to your Google Scholar search). These will be papers that summarize recent primary. You can then look up the citations in that review, which often include earlier reviews as well as the primary literature. You can also use the new terminology you learned from the review to make better searches.
Depending on the topic, review articles might be a better source than books. That mostly depends on the academic culture of a sub-field: do experts write papers or books to advance their careers? If the experts aren’t writing books, are they written instead by non-experts with an agenda?
Finally, go visit your local library. There’s a good chance that it’ll give you online access to a lot of academic databases and literature, even from home. There may even be a research librarian, who would be absolutely thrilled to help you figure out how to do your research.

15

The librarians I know are all very enthusiastic about assisting with “how to research.”

16

This. Find a reasonably recent review article on the topic and start from there. Use it like a Wikipedia article - i.e. read it to get a general feel for the topic, don’t necessarily trust specific information in it (and absolutely don’t cite the review article itself it in your article), but use its citation list to find the source material.

Review articles are absolutely more reliable than books. Books aren’t peer-reviewed. Anybody can write a book. Review articles usually are peer-reviewed.

Also - every field has a couple of big-name journals that you submit to if you make a ground-breaking discovery. Figure out which ones they are - not only are those journals better reviewed, but also likely to have more significant and meaningful articles. You can probably figure it out from just looking at the citation list of a review article. You can also look up the impact factor of journals.

17

OP: when you talk about being a student are you associated with an academic institution? If so they probably have lots of online subscriptions–contact the library.

There is a Firefox and Chrome extension to find unpaywalled copies of academic papers:
http://unpaywall.org/
Unfortunately the few times I tried it I didn’t find any.

No one has yet mentioned Wikipedia. While everyone agrees it has serious problems, on average it is better than most of the first page of Google results. And check the references on Wikipedia articles.

I would greatly appreciate if people would broaden their answers over the OP’s specific problems. When I use Google the top responses are dominated with companies selling products or fluff.

18

That’s a good tip. A common alternative to “review” is “survey”.

19

And some fields have journals dedicated to review articles. Some (many?) are annual journals named Annual Reviews of <field/topic>.

20

Once you’ve amassed vast folders of PDFs, reprints and photocopies, your next step (perhaps it shold have been your first) is to manage them as a resource. There are a some biggish reference managers - I’ve just gone from the commercial Endnote (with a freebie version for students) to Zotero, issued free. There are others and each has different advantages.

All should be able to have the titles of any papers, books, electronic media, maps, interview notes etc captured, so that if you write a paper and need the references formatted in Journal X’s style, it will do that automatically. More importantly it allows you to capture your own notes and comments, cross-link to different papers, and catalogue them with tags or key words. Searching for that exact set of words you read two years ago was never easier (if you don’t know by now, relying on your memory is one of the cardinal sins of scholarly writing).

Bit of work to get it happening, but saves so much time in hunting particular sources of info down the track.