Instructor Resource
Treadwell and Davis, Introducing Communication Research: Paths of Inquiry, 4e
SAGE Publishing, 2020
Lecture Notes
Chapter 4: You Could Look It Up: Reading, Recording, and Reviewing
Research
Learning Objectives
4-1 Explain why library research is a necessary preliminary to your own research.
4-2 Illustrate the difference between relevant information and quality information.
4-7 Identify key questions you might ask to assess whether an item of information is
credible.
4-8 Discuss the concept of Boolean logic and its use in researching databases.
Chapter Summary
This chapter begins by explaining why library research is a necessary preliminary to your own
research. Next, the chapter illustrates the difference between relevant information and quality
information. Then, the chapter describes with examples the difference between search engines
Instructor Resource
Treadwell and Davis, Introducing Communication Research: Paths of Inquiry, 4e
SAGE Publishing, 2020
Annotated Chapter Outline
I. Library Research: Why Bother?
A. Methods
1. Reveal methods that challenge conventional wisdom
B. Theory
1. Reviewing theory in your literature search can help give your study direction.
C. Ethics
1. See how participants were recruited, treated, and debriefed.
D. Language and style
1. Each research specialization is a community defined by its own language and way
E. Inspiration
1. Discover one great “breakthrough” paper that suddenly makes a difficult concept
clear.
II. Finding Relevance, Finding Quality
A. Identifying relevant information
1. Use communication as a search term, and you will get material on mass, group,
B. Identifying quality information
1. Information that has been obtained in a way that meets scholarly standards.
III. Scholarly Databases Versus Search Engines
A. Search engines
Instructor Resource
Treadwell and Davis, Introducing Communication Research: Paths of Inquiry, 4e
SAGE Publishing, 2020
1. Examples in Google, Yahoo, Bing, Lycos, Dogpile, and DuckDuckGo.
B. Databases
1. Research scholarly databases.
2. Databases have a defined number of entries.
a. Databases consist of scholarly peer-reviewed articles.
IV. Scholarly Journals: A Good Starting Point
A. Scholarly journals
1. Communication Research
2. International Journal of Business Communication
B. Assessing scholarly journals
1. Impact factor: measure of the number of times the articles in a journal are cited
V. Scholarly, Popular, and Trade Publications: What Is the Difference?
A. How will I know a scholarly article when I see one?
1. Journal of…
Instructor Resource
Treadwell and Davis, Introducing Communication Research: Paths of Inquiry, 4e
SAGE Publishing, 2020
2. Popular
a. Published without a refereeing process.
b. Newspaper and magazine stories are typical examples of popular articles.
3. Trade
a. Written by experts, but the experts are more likely to be practitioners than
academics.
VI. Primary Versus Secondary Sources
A. Primary source
1. Original research
B. Secondary source
1. Another author’s summary of the primary source.
VII. Search Strategies: General to Specific and Specific to General
A. Bibliographic research
1. Start with a wide-ranging search and many search results.
B. The champagne glass model of bibliographic research
1. Wide-ranging findings from your initial search.
VIII. Search Terms and Search Fields
A. Search terms
1. Words entered into a database or search engine.
Instructor Resource
Treadwell and Davis, Introducing Communication Research: Paths of Inquiry, 4e
SAGE Publishing, 2020
B. Search fields
1. Searchable aspects of a database such as author, date, and journal title.
IX. How Can the Library of Congress Help My Literature Search?
A. Subject headings
1. Be familiar with the Library of Congress (LOC) Subject Headings.
X. Other Resources
A. Examples
1. Journals, books, and databases are not the only resources available.
XI. Being Skeptical about Information: Websites and Fake News
A. Stage 1: think book or journal
1. Author’s credentials.
2. Author’s affiliation.
3. Date of publication and edition or revision.
B. Stage 2: additional questions for websites
1. What does the URL tell you?
2. Does the site tell you the criteria by which information is accepted or rejected?
Instructor Resource
Treadwell and Davis, Introducing Communication Research: Paths of Inquiry, 4e
SAGE Publishing, 2020
C. Assessing fake news and other non-scholarly sources
1. Fake news has been around as long as news itself.
2. Lazer et al. (2018) define fake news as “fabricated information that mimics news
XII. Mr. Boole and the Three Bears
A. Boolean operators
1. Reduce the number of search results by asking the right combination of
questions.
2. Boolean operators: linguistic algebra, the three most basic operations of which
XIII. Saving Your Search Results
A. Information you must record
1. Author—full name.
2. Title of book, or of article and journal in which it appears.
3. Date of publication, and volume and issue number if a journal.
B. Information you should record
Instructor Resource
Treadwell and Davis, Introducing Communication Research: Paths of Inquiry, 4e
SAGE Publishing, 2020
1. Method.
2. Results and conclusions.
C. Citation management software
1. Organize and retrieve citations for books, articles, and websites by interfacing
XIV. Reviewing the Literature
A. Distinct from the literature review
1. The process by which you get from many relevant scholarly materials to a final
product.
XV. The Literature Review: Writing Your Search Results
A. Structuring the literature review
1. History.
B. Question of style
1. The most common style in the social sciences is APA (American Psychological
Association).