Searching for information in an efficient way, and evaluating that information on how relevant and credible it is, are crucial aspects of your academic studies. In this first module, we will go over the most important steps in the information search process.
In this day and age, finding information on the internet is easy. But establishing the credibility of that information is a lot more difficult. It is also difficult to understand why some results show up during a certain search, and not others. By learning to be more critical towards the information you find, and what search engine/database to use for what purpose, you will be well equipped for your continued studies and upcoming working life.
In academia, we often want to find current research information on a topic, that is, different types of scholarly material. The process of finding this type of material differs from how you might normally search for information in your day-to-day life, for example, by using Google or asking ChatGPT.
One reason for why scholarly material is more difficult to find is that this type of information is not often freely available on the internet. It needs to be searched for in specific search engines and databases. It is usually through the university library that scholarly information is made available to you as a student. However, even if scholarly information would be freely available to search for, it would still be difficult to find the information that is relevant for you. Therefore, it is a good idea to practice how to find relevant material, coming up with useful search terms, knowing where to look for different types of academic material, as well as how to evaluate the information you find. All of these are important aspects of academic information literacy.
Researchers often publish their research in articles. One reason for this is that they want to reach out with their research as soon as possible. The articles are often published in academic journals, or in conference proceedings. You can search for academic articles in different places, for example in DiVA or in Google Scholar. In many search engines and databases, you can limit the search result to things that have been peer-reviewed. If you do this it is still important to evaluate the article to make sure that it is scholarly, since this function is not foolproof.
Academic journals have committees of experts, or referees, who review the quality of the articles before they can be published. After the review process is over and the article has been approved, it is said to have been peer-reviewed. It is rarely mentioned in the article itself that it has been peer-reviewed. If you want to make sure that a journal is academic, and want to see how the peer review process is done for that specific journal, you can find this information at the journal's webpage (often under a menu titled Editorial board).
Most academic journals are written in English since researchers want to reach out with their research to as many people as possible. Therefore it is important to search in English when looking for scholarly information for your assignment, regardless of your native language.
IMRaD (Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion)
Another way to determine if the text in front of you is scholarly is to look at the disposition of the text, how it is structured. Journal articles often follow the commonly used academic template IMRaD, which dictates that the text contains the following sections. Note that journal articles don't have to have these exact headlines, but the text should contain sections that cover these aspects.
Introduction