Skip to Main Content

GED-800 Dissertation Seminar

Advanced Research for the Dissertation

When You Find a Good Article...

  • Save it! Download the PDF if possible, or print to PDF. If you use the personal account feature in EBSCO or ProQuest, save it to your folder. It is always important to save a copy on a local drive or your cloud drive.
  • Using the Cite function in the database, copy and paste the citation into a Word document. It is much easier to keep track of this as you go, than to reconstruct it later.
  • Check out the subject headings and general terminology used. Does it differ from the search terms that you've been using? If so, you could adjust your search strategy to incorporate a newly discovered subject heading or term and find additional relevant results.
  • Read it, starting with the abstract and the introduction, then skip down to conclusion. Circle back to the methods. Take notes on your impressions, any quotes or data that you want to reference, and any questions that come to mind.
  • Use it to find more sources. First, see if anything catches your interest in the literature review, and then check the References List at the end. This is a way of following the scholarly conversation backward from your original article.
  • Look the article up on Google Scholar and see how many times it has been cited. This can be an indicator of how important an article is. And then you can follow through to find the articles that have cited your original article. This is called Cited Reference Searching - it is a way of following the scholarly conversation forward from your article.