Advanced Library Research: Building on your Courseroom Skills
Throughout your coursework, you will be collecting journal articles and research. As you progress in your program and encounter the research in your field, keep these questions in mind to help prepare you for your comprehensive exam and dissertation:
Who are the authors who have influenced your field?
Review course syllabi, course and optional readings and textbooks from important courses in your program. What names appear frequently? What journal titles do you see again and again? What theories or theorist have you already written papers on? Also review the references from the papers you wrote to find useful authors, articles and journals.
How have ideas or theories in your field evolved over time? How have they been challenged or confirmed?
A body of knowledge advances through time as scholars create and test theories and make discoveries based on new, original research. In preparing for your comps or dissertation these changes over time help you to determine where a specific topic or discipline is going. These will be important for the comprehensive examinations and dissertations in which you will be expected to write about the depth and breadth of topics covered in your courses, not just the most current research as may have been required in your coursework.
Where are the gaps? What new knowledge is needed?
The next step to building on depth and breadth of a topic is to create new knowledge. This will occur in the dissertation where you will create a thesis or research question and use research methods (qualitative, quantitative, mixed, etc.) to collect and analyze data. The library research done in the literature review will also be foundational to the new, original data you will be collecting. You will need to use all of the resources and services available from the Capella Library and may even need to use other academic libraries near your home or work.
