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 further sources of help.
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.
To work through the tutorial, use the arrows to the right of the screen to progress through the tutorial, or click on the dashed lines to view the contents. We recommend viewing this in full screen.
Before you begin your research, it is worth planning your search. 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:
| Social media | Higher Education | Learning |
|---|---|---|
| Social networking sites | HE | Development |
| Education | Students | |
| Universities | Student learning | |
| YouTube | University |
Across the rows are the different ideas relating to the research. In this case, the search is about social media in Higher Education and the the impact on learning. The keywords are social media, higher education, learning. Down each column are alternative search words.
From here you can develop meaningful search strategies e.g. Social Media and Higher Education / Social Media and Universities and Students
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.
From the A-Z databases page you can filter by subject to see the key resources for Business and Management. 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.
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.
