Research Strategies: Finding Your Way through the Information Fog

Everyone does research. Some just do it better than others. This book is definitely for you if you are:  a university student whose research projects have been patented as a cure for insomnia  a captain of industry who’s been told to do a feasibility study on the expansion potential of winter ice cream bar sales in Nome, Alaska  Anyone trying to make sense of our increasingly crazy world of information Are you ready for your next research project? Really ready? Do you have the skills and strategies to get the job done efficiently and effectively without panic attacks and the need for a long vacation when you’re done? Do you have confidence that you can start with a topic about which you know nothing and end with an understanding of it that is neither trite nor superficial? Are you prepared to enjoy the experience? (Yes, I did say, “Enjoy.”) If the previous paragraph has left you feeling somewhat queasy, this book is for you. Even if you think you have significant research skills, you can learn better ones if you take the time to read on. You have the privilege of living in the information age, with boundless opportunities all around you to find out anything about anything. But, faced with a serious number of websites and social media, not to mention academic and commercial databases of increasing size and complexity, knowing how to navigate through the information fog isn’t something you can pick up easily on your own. Truth to tell, we have a ton of studies telling us that most people have vastly higher opinions about their own research ability than actual tests of that ability can demonstrate. You think you’re a great researcher, but a test of your skills may well show they are weaker than you think Yet you can hardly call yourself educated if you don’t actually have good skills to handle complex information systems and do research effectively, not in a world in which most careers are built more on what you can find out than what you already know. Who am I to try to teach you about research? Just someone who has taught the strategies in this book to thousands of anxious university students, both undergraduate and graduate, for over 35 years (making me a dinosaur?), and who likes nothing better than to guide people through the information fog. I am Associate Librarian for Associated Canadian Theological Schools and Information Literacy at Trinity Western University. Being the author of a number of books and scholarly articles myself (see my bio at http://williambadke.com/badke.htm), you can rest assured that I’ve devoted a lot of my life to doing research and not just teaching it. So I understand what you’re going through. One caution: This book is about informational research. It won’t teach you how to do a science experiment or determine the best way to train a rat how to ride a tiny bicycle (though it will help you do a literature review). But if you need to identify a problem and then acquire and use information to address the problem, this book is for you. Learning how to do research does not have to be painful. It can be fun. Honestly. Personally, research gives me so much pleasure that my family has to kidnap me out of the library whenever they want to go on an outing or buy groceries. You can have the same joy that I have. Read on. Updates to the textbook will be posted at: http://williambadke.com/updates.htm For live links to each of the URLs in Research Strategies: https://libguides.twu.ca/RES502/LiveLinks See my website for courses, syllabi, presentations etc.: http://williambadke.com/TeachingResources.htm Meet me on Facebook. Search for: Research Strategies 1 Welcome to the Information Fog We have been living in the middle of a revolution since the 1990s. Not since the creation of the printing press (and maybe not ever) has our concept of information been so disrupted. The driving force of the information revolution is the World Wide Web, which has given us access to more knowledge than ever before in human history. Information used to be scarce, thus creating a demand for experts who knew things and could share those things with the rest of us. Now we have Google, the information candy store, which makes information abundant and challenges the role of the expert. “Information candy store?” Yes. Google serves up lots of enticing stuff right there at our fingertips, most of it looking good enough to devour. The down side of a candy store, if there could ever be a down side, is that candy tends to be loaded with empty calories. No, I’m not down on Google or Bing or whatever search engine suits your fancy. We won’t be Google-bashing here. But there is so much more than Google. The revolution in information has led many of us to believe that Google is god, or at least the ultimate information source. But nothing is that simple. Fact is, we live in an era in which there is untold opportunity to go beyond Google. And we also live in an era that is much more complicated than it used to be. At one time we thought we knew what information was. Now we’re not so sure. These days we’re buried in data, and defining what is and what is not genuine information is getting to be more of a challenge all the time. (For a related graphical presentation, see my Prezi, “No One Knows for Sure what Information is Anymore,” http://bit.ly/1S6m4pb). Information is supposed to inform. That means it has to be reliable, relevant, current, and so on. It is not supposed to deceive us. There was a time when people believed that, given the right information, we could solve any problem the human race encountered. They thought that the power of reason could be used in a totally objective way to wade through all the data and come up with the right answers, even to arrive at the truth. Now we’re no longer even sure what the questions are (and we can’t remember last Tuesday). To be sure, we’ve always known that some of what passes for information can’t be trusted. That’s why we have law courts to determine the facts of a matter, though the best liar often wins. Some are calling this the “Post Truth” era in which we are moving dangerously close to being unable to trust much of anything we see or hear. That is not good thing (more on this in Appendix B). We’ve come to understand over the past hundred years or so that information is colored with subjectivity: What we know depends on how we interpret our knowledge base. Even the best authors of information bring their own biases into the mix. Thus, for good or ill, we are no longer as trusting as used to be when it comes to interacting with information. It’s like buying a Rolex from a man in an alley: It might be a real Rolex coming from somebody down on his luck, but, unless you know Rolexes, you could well be getting a knock-off. I’d like to take a bit of time to trace the events that have led us to this place. Textbooks, after all, are supposed to lead you on a journey through history and philosophy-of-whatever before they get to the good stuff. But in the case of information, the next few pages really are essential to doing good research. Believe it or not, you need to understand our world of information if you want to do intelligent research within its often foggy terrain. So how did we get here, to an age dominated by the World Wide Web?