The 7-Step Program to Researching

To build on the library tutorial, we have put together this tailored list of resources and expectations that will help you with your class writing assignment. We will cover:

• Step 1. Do fact finding on your question
• Step 2. Find the best resources via the library databases
• Step 3. Find the best resources via websites
• Step 4. Find other good resources
• Step 5. Throw out bad resources
• Step 6. Integrate your resources into your paper
• Step 7. Cite your resources properly

Through these steps, you will learn how to find the best resources to use for a geology research assignment, the best practices for choosing good resources, and the methods for citing or referencing your resources.

Step 1. Do Fact Finding on Your Question

Regardless of which geology course you are enrolled in, your instructor likely gave you a problem you will do some research on. In this example, we will pretend your instructor gave you an assignment on "natural hazards posed by dams."

Yes, go to Google First.

How does this relate to my class? Here are some examples tied to our classes. In a service learning projects, you may do a litter clean up and remove the invasive species Garlic Mustard--in this case "environmental problems of littering" "causes of littering" "problems of invasive species in Indiana" "problems caused by Garlic Mustard" will become your question to research. For a research paper or fact sheet, your instructor will give you a topic, such as "ocean pollution and the cruise ship industry" or "environmental impacts of coal fly ash disposal." Since your instructor defined your research question, you are ready to gather facts.

Your first goal will be not to find websites to help your research, but to find words or terms that will help you find good websites.

• Create a list of terms to search. Use your textbook or encyclopedia to identify synonyms or associated terms. We may discover "natural disaster" "dam break" "spillway" "piping" "landslide" "dam maintenance" "dam inspection" "dam failure" "flood"
• Find more terms. Using these generic terms, use a search engine like Google or Yahoo (or whatever your preference) to find more specific and technical terms. At this point, the quality of the websites you find is not too important--as you are just looking for words associated with the problem, not resources. If you find a bad term or idea, you'll discover it in step 2 and 3. You may start finding case studies (or previous or near disasters), you may find the names of government organizations in charge of monitoring dams, you may find technical terms/descriptions of how dams become hazardous, you may find information on disaster preparedness.


As described in Step 1, organize your terms into a flow chart or list of categories, and use color coding to show relationships. Click for a larger image.

• Use the terms and create a flow chart. Now that you have a large list of terms, you want to start organizing the terms into categories like "case studies", "government organizations" "geology of dam building." Under each category, list the terms that you believe are most relevant to each of these categories, and draw arrows or use color coding to indicate the relationship between terms.

If you are not quite sure what categories to make, keep searching until you keep finding the same information or terms repeat (for example, you may find FEMA, or the Federal Emergency Management Agency, keeps repeating.

As an example of the last bullet, using our flow chart example above, we may find in the case study category terms like "Vaiont Dam Disaster," "Teton Dam Collapse," "Johnstown Flood," "Lake Cumberland," and "Buffalo Creek Flood."