Developing a Search Strategy

Reading the chapter on search strategies was very helpful to help write and think of ideas for my research paper. I learned a lot learned a lot about search strategies, which is different ways in which you gather information to answer your research question. A source is the first thing that you should look at when researching because it gives you evidence and proof of the claim your are trying to proof and a secondary source is not as reliable because it is someone’s opinion or ideas. When the chapter talked about surveying a group of people to back up a source or evidence that you have, I thought it was really cool and interesting because for our final in math last year it was all about surveys and bias. We got to see that you can’t just rely on surveys to proof your point or get a clear answer. One thing that I don’t really have any experience in that I learned about was interviewing. The book gave a lot of good information about how to take notes during an interview and what to look for in order to establish if it is trustworthy information. One thing that is really important is too have a working bibliography in order to keep all your sources that you looked at for your research. It is easy just to keep them on note cards and rearrange them later into the final draft. Going off the bibliography there is something called an annotated bibliography, which also includes a brief summary of the source. I’ve never done this style before but I can see how it would help a lot on looking back to the website for another information. The last part of this chapter talked about how to take content notes. It suggested that you keep the notes on index cards so you can easily relate them to the bibliography items, which I thought was a really good idea. This chapter defiantly helped clear up question and I learned a lot about my search strategy.