Trying to write a research paper for graduate school
January 21, 2025 7:33 PM   Subscribe

This is for a research methods class in master's degree program in applied linguistics. I have my topic, but I need to nail down my research question and figure out my methodology. I'm overwhelmed by searching and sifting through and reading journal articles and keeping it all organized. I'm hoping some of you will have some guidance for me!

Despite making it this far in my program (I'm almost done), honestly do not have much experience doing research like this (either in this program or in my undergrad program from 20 years ago). I have talked to the professor. She's very helpful, and has given us different assignments to scaffold the final project, but I've had her for quite a few classes previously, and it is clear that our respective brains work very differently, especially when it comes to organizing information. At this point, I know I need to read a lot of articles to deepen my understanding of the topic to develop my ideas and move forward, but I'm at a bit of a loss for how to go about it and keep track of it other than Google Scholar/my school's library database and a Doc of notes.

I would be grateful for any guidance you all can give me!
posted by I_carried_a_watermelon to Education (11 answers total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
I would see if your college subject librarian would meet with you for a consultation? Maybe talking through the subject with someone else would help you clarify your thoughts?

Another thing might be to create research or literature matrix to help organize your thoughts.
https://youtu.be/M2He9ow5n9w?si=I_egnJGqa6YT07q9
Finally, don't feel bad about your current stage. Research is 100% supposed to be messy. In library science we talk about the affective stages one goes through to do research. This is one of them!
posted by aetg at 7:41 PM on January 21 [2 favorites]


* Yes, definitely consult with the subject specialist librarian at your university for linguistics/social sciences.

* Download Zotero, a free program for citation management. It can do your citations automatically, in whatever style you like, but even more usefully, you can download PDFs, you can mark up and annotate PDFs, add tags and notes, sort your papers into different folders, etc.

* One thing that helps me is to freewrite about what information I have, what information I still need, and how I might want to organize what I already have. (This might be as simple as using a colored pencil to draw line between information that should be connected.) Then I can think about it in terms of, for example, "I still need one more good paper about the effects of car dependent urban environments on low-income people," and that helps me focus my searching.
posted by Jeanne at 7:50 PM on January 21 [6 favorites]


Please please please ask your librarian. I would be so sad to know a student posted here instead of asking me for help. There’s no dumb question, nothing to confess. They can help you find the right databases and give you suggestions to narrow and refine your topic. They can suggest software to organize all this. Part of learning to research is learning to work with librarians.
posted by bluedaisy at 8:01 PM on January 21 [12 favorites]


Read Writing Literature Reviews by Galvan and Galvan. Takes you through this process step by step.
posted by shadygrove at 8:51 PM on January 21 [2 favorites]


I second Zotero for keeping track of papers that you think are important and want to collect and organise locally. I haven't used it for a long time, since I no longer need it, but I remember it being pretty good when I was doing this for my MSc.
posted by confluency at 2:10 AM on January 22


I am in a similar position to you, having just finished a research methods module and submitted my dissertation proposal for a Masters. I agree with all above that asking a school librarian is the best! And also using a Reference system. I've tried Zotero (free) and EndNote (my school gives students free subscriptions) which both integrate with MS Word and the system is amazing. I actually prefer EndNote as I think it handles in-line citations better than Zotero.

You don't say if you're planning a desk-based or in-field project, but two books/e-books (through the library) I found super helpful for thinking about structuring my desk-based project (e.g. how to write a research question, how to think about what to include in a literature review versus methodology section) are:

Bassot, B. (2022). Doing Qualitative Desk-Based Research: A Practical Guide to Writing an Excellent Dissertation.

Grant, A. 2022. Doing Your Research Project with Documents: A Step-By-Step Guide to Take You from Start to Finish. Bristol: Policy Press.
posted by atlantica at 2:49 AM on January 22 [1 favorite]


When you say research methods, do you mean a quantitative methods course that probably started from basic probability and worked its way up to OLS regression or anova? Or do you mean a more scope-and-methods course that maybe starts with a bunch of philosophy of science and works its way through theory building, hypotheses, operationalization, etc?
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 3:20 AM on January 22


Public health professor here. Don't get bogged down in endless churning through the literature- it can be a timesuck and there is often no end to it. Try to find reviews of the topic- summaries- then if you want to go deeper, read the references from that review within a particular area- this is usually a good start to anything.
Make a bulleted summary of pertinent findings from each paper you read.
As you start writing, I like to start with a plain english outline of what I want to say. For example, I work on tuberculosis, so i might write something like:
-TB is a big problem worldwide
-Diagnosis is challenging and contributes to transmission
-New diagnostic tests are costly and difficult to implement
-Cheaper and simpler diagnostic tests are needed, but we are lacking good evidence of their accuracy and effictiveness.

Then I go find the pieces of evidence I need to support each statement. This is instead of reading and trying to synthesize all the evidence and make points out of it- most likely you kind of already know the direction you want to go in.

best of luck.
posted by rene_billingsworth at 6:54 AM on January 22 [4 favorites]


I'm a retired academic librarian. Meeting with a librarian could be really helpful, maybe more helpful than meeting with your professor. The librarian is only there to help, she/he will not be grading you, unlike your prof, so you will feel more comfortable being confused. And the librarian may be able to help you figure out what your research question is; I did that a lot with students, they would come to me with a vague idea and then we would play with it, I'd get them to clarify stuff I didn't understand, and in the process the student's ideas became more focused.
posted by mareli at 9:09 AM on January 22 [2 favorites]


I like EndNote, but use it as a supplement to my own excel based article tracking system that I customize depending on the breadth and scope of the project I'm working on.

Belcher's Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks was a really great resource for me as someone who started back in a master's programs year and years after undergrad and with little research experience.
posted by OsoMeaty at 11:51 AM on January 22


Response by poster: GCU Sweet and Full of Grace, it's definitely a more "scope-and-methods course ".

Atlantica, it's a desk-based project. I'm using corpus data in lieu of doing my own experiment.

Thanks everyone! I hadn't even thought of talking to one of the university's librarians.
posted by I_carried_a_watermelon at 10:54 AM on January 23


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