This site has been designed to introduce you to researching for your dissertation. The focus is on how to identify and search for academic literature, but you may also need to locate other types of information and data at times. The guide includes links to guides that will help you locate other types of information.
You will need to use good quality information to support your work. The following tutorial will help you to recognise different types of academic sources and their importance for research.
Use the arrows to navigate through the tutorial or click on the dashed lines at the top to view the contents. It is recommended that you view the tutorial in full screen.
Before you begin your research, it is worth doing a bit of planning up front. Consider your research question and any objectives you have and the different search words that relate to this. These are what we would call keywords. You can map these out in a way that helps you to carry out your searches and come up with different search strategies. Here is an example search table:
| Political Apathy | Voting | UK |
|---|---|---|
| Apolitical | Elections | United Kingdom |
| Political disengagement | Voters | England |
| Political engagement | General Election | British system |
| Voter fatigue |
From here you can develop meaningful search strategies e.g. Political engagement and General Election / Political apathy and elections
If you need anything we do not have in the library collections at the University of Northampton. please make use of Interlibrary Loans and the SCONUL Access scheme.
From the A-Z databases page you can filter by subject to see the key resources for Politics and International Relations. The top box shows the 'best bets' for searching but here is a full list of useful databases for academic research:
Links to videos are available at the bottom of this page to help you with some of these resources.
You can use NELSON to search the library’s books, e-books, e-journals, videos and more. Sign-in with your University login to access the full-text. This is a broad search tool, so you may prefer to use the library databases.
