Writing 117-01 (Winek, Spring 2024)

Part of creating your research question involves understanding what librarians call your "Information need." What type(s) of information will help you answer your research question? And what information is available to researchers?

Information can be categorized many ways. For example, sources of information can be primary, secondary, or tertiary. Information can be published for a scholarly, popular or trade/professional audience. Information can be raw data that needs to be analyzed or it can be statistics that tell a story. 

The information in Step 3 of this guide will help you find information. The information in Step 4 will help you read what you find strategically end evaluate it for credibility.

Check out this short (2:10) video from Jennifer Lee at U. Calgary for an overview of review and research articles.

Empirical research articles are based on an experiment or study.  The authors will report the purpose of the study, the research methodology, and results. This is a familiar structure for original research articles > IMRAD: introduction, methods, results, and discussion.

Also called:

• primary research article/source
• primary literature article
• original research article

Note:

In describing the purpose of their study, authors will present a mini literature review to discuss how previous research has led up to their original research project.

Review articles summarize or synthesize content from earlier published research and are useful for surveying the literature on a specific research area.  Review articles can lead you to original research articles.

• Narrative Review: a literature review that describes and discusses the state of the science of a specific topic or theme.
• Systematic Review: a comprehensive review of all relevant studies on a particular topic/question. The systematic review is created by following an explicit methodology for identifying/selecting the studies to include and evaluating their results.
• Meta-Analysis: the statistical procedure for combining data from multiple studies. This is usually but not always presented with a systematic review. 

Often you will be asked to include peer-reviewed literature in your writing.  Fortunately, many databases include a Scholarly/Peer-Reviewed/Academic Journal limiter to help you determine is an article is indeed peer reviewed.